What think ye now, my good friends? Is it any longer a doubt, that the constitution of the _English_ government, such I mean as it appears to have been from the most unquestioned annals of our country, is a free constitution? Is there any thing more in the way of this conclusion? or does it not force itself upon us, and lie open to the mind of every plain man that but turns his attention upon this subject?
You began, Mr. SOMERS, with great fears and apprehensions; or you thought fit to counterfeit them, at least. You suspected the matter was too mysterious for common understandings to penetrate, and too much involved in the darkness of ancient times to be brought into open day-light. Let me hear your free thoughts on the evidence I have here produced to you. And yet it is a small part only of that which might be produced, of that I am sure which yourself could easily have produced, and perhaps expected from me.
But I content myself with these obvious truths, “That the liberty of the subject appears, and of itself naturally arose, from the very nature of the FEUDAL, which is properly (at least if we look no further back than the Conquest) the _English_ constitution; that the current of liberty has been gradually widening, as well as purifying, in proportion as it descended from its source; that charters and laws have removed every scruple that might arise about the reciprocal rights and privileges of prince and people; that the sense of that liberty which the nation enjoyed under their admirable constitution was so quick, that every the least attempt to deprive them of it gave an alarm; and their attachment to it so strong and constant, that no artifice, no intrigue, no perversion of law and gospel, could induce them to part with it: that, in particular, they have guarded this precious deposite of legal and constitutional liberty with such care, that, while the heedless reception of a foreign law, concurring with other circumstances, hath riveted the yoke of slavery on the other nations of _Europe_, this of _England_ could never be cajoled nor driven into any terms of accommodation with it; but, as NAT. BACON[154] said truly, _That the triple crown could never well solder with the English_, so neither could the _imperial_; and that, in a word, the ENGLISH LAW hath always been preserved inviolate from the impure mixtures of the canon and Cæsarean laws, as the sole defence and bulwark of our civil liberties.”