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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Lord Camden, C. J. (p. 291): ''Our law holds the property of 

 every man so sacred that no man can set his foot upon his neigh- 

 bor's close without his leave. . . . The defendants have no right to 

 avail themselves of the usage of these warrants since the revolu- 

 tion. . . . We can safely say there is no law in this country to 

 justify the defendants in what they have done ; if there was, it 

 would destroy all the comforts of society ; for papers are often the 

 dearest property a man can have." 



Only a little later, passing to our own side of the ocean, we 

 again find a complete condemnation of all modern acts which im- 

 pair personal liberty in one of the prime causes of the War of the 

 Revolution. When James Otis resisted the writs of assistance, by 

 which the attempt was being made to compel the citizens of Bos- 

 ton to assist the Surveyor of Duties in searching vaults, cellars, 

 warehouses, shops, and other places for goods which might have 

 been imported contrary to act of Parliament, he cited the common 

 law of England as controlling acts of Parliament, as laid down by 

 Lord Coke.* 



When this appeal failed, the colonists threw off the power by 

 which they had been oppressed and adopted the remedy, the 

 terms of which are so well stated by Mr. Justice Gray in his 

 exhaustive review of this chapter in the history of American 

 jurisprudence, f 



We are thus brought near to our own time and to the decisions 

 of our own courts, by which personal liberty has been re-established 

 and the right of every man to control the disposition of his own 

 time may be maintained. It seems passing strange that one 

 must resort to the decisions of the courts in order to find a true 

 definition of personal liberty. One would have thought that it 

 would have been found in the very statutes which the courts have 

 annulled. 



The very power which Parliament had assumed and which 

 caused the colonies to rebel is now in some directions assumed by 

 the Legislature of Massachusetts. The remedy lies in an appeal to 

 the common law, which is the common heritage of the English- 

 speaking people everywhere, and in this country has been embod- 

 ied in our written Constitution and Bill of Rights. 



Among the many decisions of the courts sustaining the right 

 of every man sui juris either to combine with others in the pur- 

 suit of a common end, so long as such union or association did 

 not impair the equal right of any one to work at his own will or 

 " for his own hand " outside such unions or associations, none have 

 been more lucidly or firmly presented than those given by Chief- 

 Justice Shaw, of Massachusetts. (Commonwealth vs. Hunt, 4 



*Bonham'8 case, 8 Rep., 118 a. f Quincy's Reports, Appendix I, p. 540. 



