1863.] 217 [Price. 



the people, responsible alone to God and their conscience, which 

 should have been heard in the sanctuaries of justice, as fountains 

 springing fresh from the lap of earth, became like waters constrained 

 in their course by art, stagnant and impure. Until this weight hung 

 upon the Constitution should be taken off, there was literally no 

 prospect of enjoying with security those civil privileges which it held 

 forth." (1 Const. Hist, of Eng. 315.) He further says, "I have 

 found it impossible not to anticipate, in more places than one, some 

 of those glaring transgressions of natural as well as positive law, that 

 rendered our courts of justice in cases of treason, little better than 

 the caverns of murderers. Whoever was arraigned at their bar was 

 almost certain to meet a virulent prosecutor, a judge hardly distin- 

 guishable from the prosecutor, except by his ermine, and a passive, 

 pusillanimous jury. Those who are acquainted only with our modern 

 decent and dignified procedure, can form little conception of the 

 irregularity of ancient trials, the perpetual interrogation of the 

 prisoner, which justly gives us so much offence at this day in the 

 tribunals of a neighboring kingdom, and the want of all evidence ex- 

 cept written, and perhaps unattested examinations or confessions." 

 (1 Const. Hist, of Eng. 312.) 



It was under the reigns of the arbitrary Tudors and Stuarts that 

 bad precedents were most made and followed, and juries were most 

 coerced by hunger, thirst, fines, and imprisonment, but this course 

 of tyrannical procedure was in a great measure brought to an end by 

 the trial of William Penn and William Mead, at an Oyer and Ter- 

 miner Court, held in the Old Bailey in London, in 1670, and in the 

 hearing of Edward Bushel, one of the jurors, brought up from prison 

 on Habeas Corpus, before the Judges of the Common Pleas. On 

 the trial of Penn and Mead, they were rudely and insolently treated 

 by the Court, but they as resolutely maintained their rights, and 

 those of the jury under Magna Charta. The charge against those 

 Friends was the holding an unlawful and tumultuous assembly in 

 Grace Church Street; where they had but assembled to worship God 

 as near as they could to their meeting-house, which the civil authority 

 had closed against them. The jury, some of whom had caught the 

 liberty-loving spirit of Penn, after deliberation, declared that they 

 could not agree. The uncomplying four were ordered into court, one 

 of whom was Bushel, and after being roundly abused, retired again 

 to deliberate, and returned with the verdict as to Penn, '• Guilty of 

 speaking in Grace Church Street;" and as to Mead, "Not guilty." 

 This was an unavailable verdict as to Penn. The recorder abused 



