* See Blackstone's Magna Charta, printed at Oxford, 1759.
In the famous law of the 3rd of Charles I, called the Petition
of Right, the parliament says to the king, "Your subjects have
inherited this freedom", claiming their franchises not on abstract
principles "as the rights of men", but as the rights of Englishmen,
and as a patrimony derived from their forefathers. Selden and the
other profoundly learned men who drew this Petition of Right were as
well acquainted, at least, with all the general theories concerning
the "rights of men" as any of the discoursers in our pulpits or on
your tribune; full as well as Dr. Price or as the Abbe Sieyes. But,
for reasons worthy of that practical wisdom which superseded their
theoretic science, they preferred this positive, recorded,
hereditary title to all which can be dear to the man and the
citizen, to that vague speculative right which exposed their sure
inheritance to be scrambled for and torn to pieces by every wild,
litigious spirit.
The same policy pervades all the laws which have since been made
for the preservation of our liberties. In the 1st of William and Mary,
in the famous statute called the Declaration of Right, the two
Houses utter not a syllable of "a right to frame a government for
themselves". You will see that their whole care was to secure the
religion, laws, and liberties that had been long possessed, and had
been lately endangered.
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