im to the purest fountains of
constitutional knowledge. From the accession of the house of Tudor a new
period is to be dated in our history, far more prosperous in the
diffusion of opulence and the preservation of general order than the
preceding, but less distinguished by the spirit of freedom and jealousy
of tyrannical power. We have seen, through the twilight of our
Anglo-Saxon records, a form of civil policy established by our
ancestors, marked, like the kindred governments of the continent, with
aboriginal Teutonic features; barbarous indeed, and insufficient for the
great ends of society, but capable and worthy of the improvement it has
received, because actuated by a sound and vital spirit, the love of
freedom and of justice. From these principles arose that venerable
institution, which none but a free and simple people could have
conceived, trial by peers--an institution common in some degree to other
nations, but which, more widely extended, more strictly retained, and
better modified among ourselves, has become perhaps the first, certainly
among the first, of our securities against arbitrary government. We have
seen a foreign conqueror and his descendants trample almost alike upon
the prostrate nation and upon those who had been companions of their
victory, introduce the servitudes of feudal law with more than their
usual rigour, and establish a large revenue by continual precedents upon
a system of universal and prescriptive extortion. But the Norman and
English races, each unfit to endure oppression, forgetting their
animosities in a common interest, enforce by arms the concession of a
great charter of liberties. Privileges wrested from one faithless
monarch are preserved with continual vigilance against the machinations
of another; the rights of the people become more precise, and their
spirit more magnanimous, during the long reign of Henry III. With
greater ambition and greater abilities than his father, Edward I.
attempts in vain to govern in an arbitrary manner, and has the
mortification of seeing his prerogative fettered by still more important
limitations. The great council of the nation is opened to the
representatives of the commons. They proceed by slow and cautious steps
to remonstrate against public grievances, to check the abuses of
administration, and sometimes to chastise public delinquency in the
officers of the crown. A number of remedial provisions are added to the
statutes; every Englishman