438 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



free men who maintain their own personal liberty will in the 

 end secure the best positions aijd the most lucrative occupation. 

 These efforts, so long as they have a temporary effect, tend to the 

 privation of the very men who move for the enactment of re- 

 strictive statutes or who subject themselves to the rules of the 

 associations which limit them in the use of their own faculties. 



It is the very province of the political economist to expose the 

 wrong, even if it offends the very men who wrong themselves, and 

 to appeal to the decisions of the courts in order to establish their 

 rights as well as the rights of those who will not submit to their 

 restrictions. 



It does not yet seem to have occurred to any of those who are 

 oppressed by such public statutes, or by the rules and regulations of 

 private associations by which the attempt is made to restrict the 

 free use of time, that a remedy may be found in the courts for any 

 infringement of personal liberty, under whatever pretense the 

 public act may have been passed. It may, therefore, be expedient 

 to pass in review some of the cases in which this issue has already 

 been joined. 



In order that the firm foundation on which personal liberty 

 rests may be fully comprehended, we may go back almost to the 

 beginning, and we must recur once again to a familiar chapter of 

 the English-speaking people. 



The barons who wrested the charter of English liberty, the 

 Magna Charta, from King John, nearly eight hundred years ago, 

 were only maintaining the long existing and established rights of 

 the free men of England against the usurpation of a despotic ruler. 

 Strange that the counterpart of that ruler may be found to-day in 

 the legislatures of our own time. 



Personal liberty was established in the Magna Charta in these 

 terms : 



" No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised, or out- 

 lawed, or exiled, or anyways destroyed ; nor will we go upon him, 

 nor will we send upon him, unless by the lawful judgment of his 

 peers or by the law of the land.^' * 



In the brief limits permitted for the statement of this case we 

 may not follow the course of history, century by century ; but we 

 must pass at once to a very noted instance in which the rights of 

 the people were established by the English courts, the " case of 

 monopolies," so well known to all students of law and so often cited. 

 In the time of Elizabeth, the Queen had under taken to grant to 

 the plaintiff the monopoly of making and selling playing-cards. 

 The court held this grant to be void, and in giving the opinion 



*"Nullu3 liber homo capiattir, vec imprisonetur, aut dissaisiatur, aut utlagetur, aut exu- 

 leter, aut aliquo modo destruatur, ncc super eum ibimus, uec super cum mittemus, nisi per 

 legale judicium paiium suorum, vcl per legem terrse." 



