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Untitled Article
But fluctuations await human societies and affairs . New scenes and new rulers were prepared for our country . The Norman conquest placed another set of princes on the throne . Of these the first , in particular , was notoriously tyrannical and wanton in the exercise of his power . Nevertheless , within a few years , he confirmed the Saxon laws : he bound himself
by an oath to govern agreeably to the laws ; he founded his pretensions on testamentary succession , rather than on victory—and there was freedom in the constitution which he brought with him from his native land , and which he partly incorporated with that of which he found his British subjects in possession . Even under the Norman race of Sovereigns Liberty existed ;* though with less vigour than in many a succeeding period .
If even while princes of this descent swayed the British sceptre , if in an extremely imperfect and turbulent condition of society , considerable advances were made towards a practical acknowledgment of liberty and law , we shall not be astonished that more was done for the same object under the Plantagenet race of monarehs ; notwithstanding the civil dissensions which prevailed , and which apparently tended to favour alternately the two fatal but intimately-connected extremes of despotism and anarchy .
Few events in our constitutional history are so memorable as the execution of the Great Charter of England . Not that it was the first solemn recognition o f out country ' s rights and privileges , but the most conspicuous of any such recognitions , for the circumstances , under which it was obtained and framed , for the class of persons who demanded it , and for the clearness and extent of its provisions . What and how important it was , may be learned from one of those useful publications , which are now in a course of
popular circulation .-f But I would rather borrow a sketch of it from a Writer who was never suspected of being an enthusiastic admirer of political and civil liberty , yet whom the force of truth compels to say of this charter , that " it provides for the equal distribution of justice and free enjoyment of property , the grand objects for which , " he adds , ** political society was at first founded by men , which the people have a perpetual and unalienable right to recall , and which no time , nor precedent , nor statute , nor positive institution ought to deter them from keeping ever uppermost in their thoughts and attention . " t
For a great number of years , no feeble conflict was waged in this country between the ecclesiastical and the civil powers . The king , the nobles , the people , had all felt , and often in nearly an equal degree , the direful effects of the ascendancy of a superstitious , a corrupt and usurping system of religion , the ministers of which claimed lordship in temporal as well as in spiritual concerns . In these struggles the victory was long dubious : but the quarrel ended in the almost total defeat of those pretensions of foreign ecclesiastics , which had brought so much wretchedness on these islands and on the rest of Europe . The authority , in particular , of our municipal—our
* Hurd , ut sup ., 120 , &c . * f- The History of England , by Sir James Mackintosh . Sec , too , a nue passage in Blackstoue's Commentaries , &c , ( e ( l . 150 Vol . I . pp . 127 , &c . Sir Edward Coke , 2 hist , proem , it seems , considered Magna Chart a as , ** for the most part , declaratory of the principal grounds of the fundamental laws of England . " Those writers are grossly mistaken who date the origin of English , or even of municipal , liberty , from the reign of Henry I .
t This is the language of David Hume , Hist . ofEngl ., Ann . 1215 . The great inconsistency of political sentiment observable in that work receives some explanation from the writer ' s account of his owu life .
Untitled Article
666 Progress of Britisfr Freedom .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1830, page 666, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2589/page/10/
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