The Revolution was made to preserve our ANCIENT, indisputable laws and
liberties, and that ANCIENT constitution of government which is our only
security for law and liberty. If you are desirous of knowing the spirit
of our constitution, and the policy which predominated in that great
period which has secured it to this hour, pray look for both in our
histories, in our records, in our acts of parliament, and journals
of parliament, and not in the sermons of the Old Jewry, and the
after-dinner toasts of the Revolution Society. In the former you will
find other ideas and another language. Such a claim is as ill suited
to our temper and wishes as it is unsupported by any appearance of
authority. The very idea of the fabrication of a new government is
enough to fill us with disgust and horror. We wished at the period
of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as
AN INHERITANCE FROM OUR FOREFATHERS. Upon that body and stock of
inheritance, we have taken care not to inoculate any scion alien to the
nature of the original plant. All the reformations we have hitherto made
have proceeded upon the principle of reverence to antiquity; and I
hope, nay, I am persuaded, that all those which possibly may be
made hereafter, will be carefully formed upon analogical precedent,
authority, and example.
Our oldest reformation is that of Magna Charta. You will see that Sir
Edward Coke, that great oracle of our law, and indeed all the great men
who follow him, to Blackstone, are industrious to prove the pedigree of
our liberties. They endeavour to prove, that the ancient charter, the
Magna Charta of King John, was connected with another positive charter
from Henry I., and that both the one and the other were nothing more
than a re-affirmance of the still more ancient standing law of the
kingdom. In the matter of fact, for the greater part, these authors
appear to be in the right; perhaps not always; but if the lawyers
mistake in some particulars, it proves my position still the more
strongly, because it demonstrates the powerful prepossession towards
antiquity, with much the minds of all our lawyers and legislators, and
of all the people whom they wish to influence, have been always filled;
and the stationary policy of this kingdom in considering their most
sacred rights and franchises as an INHERITANCE.
In the famous law of the 3rd of Charles I., called the PETITION OF
RIGHT, the parliament says to the king, "Your subjects have INHERITED
this freedom," claiming their franchises not on abstract principles "as
the rights of men," but as the rights of Englishmen, and as a patrimony
derived from their forefathers. Selden, and the other profoundly learned
men, who drew this petition of right, were as well acquainted, at least,
with all the general theories concerning the "rights of men," as any of
the discoursers in our pulpits, or on your tribune; full as well as Dr.
Price, or as the Abbe Sieyes. But, for reasons worthy of that practical
wisdom which superseded their theoretic science, they preferred this
positive, recorded, HEREDITARY title to all which can be dear to the man
and the citizen, to that vague speculative right, which exposed their
sure inheritance to be scrambled for and torn to pieces by every wild,
litigious spirit.
The same policy pervades all the laws which have since been made for the
preservation of our liberties. In the 1st of William and Mary, in the
famous statute called the Declaration of Right, the two houses utter not
a syllable of "a right to frame a government for themselves." You
will see, that their whole care was to secure the religion, laws, and
liberties, that had been long possessed, and had been lately endangered.
"Taking into their most serious consideration the BEST means for making
such an establishment that their religion, laws, and liberties, might
not be in danger of being again subverted," they auspicate all their
proceedings, by stating as some of those BEST means, "in the FIRST
PLACE" to do "as their ANCESTORS IN LIKE CASES HAVE USUALLY done for
vindicating their ANCIENT rights and liberties, to DECLARE;"--and then
they pray the king and queen, "that it may be DECLARED and enacted, that
ALL AND SINGULAR the rights and liberties ASSERTED AND DECLARED, are the
true ANCIENT and indubitable rights and liberties of the people of this
kingdom."
You will observe, that from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right, it
has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert
our liberties, as an ENTAILED INHERITANCE derived to us from our
forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity, as an estate
specially belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference
whatever to any other more general or prior right. By this means our
constitution preserves a unity in so great a diversity of its parts.
We have an inheritable crown; an inheritable peerage; and a house of
commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties,
from a long line of ancestors.