10 ON THE ORIGIN AND PROGRESS 



their contemporary history presents to the student but a lifeless and 

 uninteresting blank : and future historians will be obliged to have re- 

 course to the annals of England, as was formerly the case with ancient 

 Greece and Rome, as a guide to the delineation of European history 

 during that long and dark period. 



" It is ridiculous," says Hume, in his Autobiography, " to acknow- 

 ledge a regular law of liberty in the English Constitution previous to 

 the times of the Stuarts." This great historical work is, in fact, on- 

 ly a development of that notion : yet Brodie and others seem to have 

 mistaken him ; for when he asserts a fact, namely, that the arbitrary 

 and despotic acts which so enraged the English people of that period 

 had nothing novel or peculiar in their character, but that they were 

 merely a repetition and continuation of those arbitrary and certainly 

 criminal practices which had been perpetrated, during the course of 

 many centuries, by preceding English monarchs, those writers ac- 

 tually charge him with partiality in favour of the house of Stuart. 

 Hume never intended to intimate that there was no such thing as fix- 

 ed laws with regard to national liberty ; for the very laws mentioned 

 in the petition of ris^ht in 1627 were more than sufficient to belie 

 such an assertion : all he meant was, that no respect was paid to those 

 laws by the princes, and certainly in this he only stated the melan- 

 choly truth. The monarchs never suffered the Magna Charta to 

 stand in the way of their propensities ; on the contrary, they hesitated 

 not to follow their inclinations in the very teeth of, and open violation 

 of, its provisions. If they occasionally acknowledged the national 

 right, it was more the consequence of the pressure of necessity than 

 of any thing like a moral respect for national institutions. Neither 

 the Plantagenets, nor the Tudors, nor the Stuarts, ever dreamed of any 

 thing like submission to national law, or of checking their arbitrary 

 and illegal acts, until compelled by opposition and national remon- 

 strance. More than two centuries elapsed before ihe petition of rights 

 was followed by the hill of rights. A single glance at the constitution, 

 and the history and connexion of its component parts with one an- 

 other, as well as with the general object, will convince us that their 

 rise and progress originated in accident. 



Civil right, though it is generally ranked, because q. private right, 

 far below that of the political or public right, forms, nevertheless, such 

 an essential foundation and condition of the benefits to be derived from 

 the latter, that it cannot but occupy the first rank in that point of view. 

 The common law of the Anglo-Saxons, like all the Germanic tribes, 

 was nothing more than a right of customs^ arraigning every accused 



