lawful court and to judge him by aught else than by the laws of the land, now in the middle of the nineteenth century, will appear the more forcibly, if the reader will bring to his mind that passage of Magna Charta which appeared to Chatham worth all the classics, and if he will remember the year when the Great Charter was carried. The passage, so pregnant to the mind of Chatham, is this:

"No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or be disseised of his freehold or liberties, or free customs, or be outlawed or exiled, or any otherwise destroyed; nor will we (the king) pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man, justice or right."

Publicity is a condition without which liberty cannot live. The moment it had been concluded by the present government of France to root out civil freedom, it was ordained that neither the remarks of the members of the legislative corps, nor the pleadings in the courts of justice, should be reported in the papers. Modern political publicity, however, consists chiefly in publication through the papers. We acknowledge this practically by the fact that, although our courts are never closed, yet, for particular reasons arising out of the case under consideration, the publication of the proceedings is sometimes prohibited by the judge until the close of the trial, but never beyond it.

4 Very scandalous judicial cases, offensive to public morals, are, in France, conducted with closed doors.

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Liberty stands in need of the legal precedent, and Charles the First pursued Cotton because he furnished Pym and other patriots with precedents, while the present French government has excluded instruction in history from the plan of general education. History, in a certain point of view, may be called the great precedent. History is of all branches the most nourishing for public life and liberty. It furnishes a strong pabulum and incites by great examples removed beyond all party or selfish views. The favorite book of Chatham was Plutarch, and his son educated himself upon Thucydides. The best historians have been produced by liberty, and the despot is consistent when he wishes to shackle the noble muse.

Sincere civil liberty requires that the legislature should have the initiative. All governments reluctant to grant full liberty have withheld it, and one of the first things decreed by Louis Napoleon after the second of December was that the "legislative corps" should discuss such propositions of laws only as the council of state should send to it. The council of state, however, is a mere body of officers appointed and discharged at the will of the ruler.

Liberty requires that government do not form a body permanently and essentially separated from the people; all modern absolute rulers have resorted to a number of distinctions-titles, ribbons, orders, peacock feathers and buttons, uniforms, or whatever other

5 So bishop Tomlinson tells us in the Life of his pupil.

means of separating individuals from the people at large may seem expedient.

Liberty requires the trial by jury: Consequently one of the first attacks which arbitrary power makes upon freedom is regularly directed against that trial. There is now a law in preparation in France, of which the outlines have been published, and which will place the jurors under the almost exclusive influence of the government.

Liberty requires, as we have seen, a candid and well-guaranteed trial for treason; all despotic governments, on the contrary, endeavor to break down these guarantees in particular, and either to arrogate the power of condemning political offenders without trial, or at least to strip the trial for treason of its best guarantees.

But we might go through the whole list of safeguards and principles of liberty, and find that in each case absolutism does the opposite.

If the American peruses the Declaration of Independence, he will find there, in the complaints of our forefathers, almost a complete list of those rights, privileges and guarantees which they held dearest and most essential to liberty; for they believed that nearly every guarantee had been assailed.

CHAPTER XXIII.

GALLICAN LIBERTY. SPREADING OF LIBERTY.

HAVING Considered Anglican liberty, it will be proper for us to examine the French type of civil freedom, or Gallican liberty.

In speaking here of Gallican liberty, we mean, of course, that liberty which, either in reality, if we shall find that at any period it has taken actual root, or in theory, if it have remained such, and never practically developed itself, is characteristically French. Liberty has sprouted in France as in other countries. People have felt there, as all over Europe, that the administration of justice ought to be independent of the other branches of government. The separation of the three great functions of government was proclaimed by the first constituent assembly. But the question here is, whether any of these or other endeavors to establish liberty have been consolidated into permanent institutions, whether they have been allowed to develop themselves, and whether they were or are peculiar to the Gallican tribe, or were adopted from another system of developed civil liberty, as we adopt the whole or parts of an order of architecture or a philosophical system; and

if we find no such institutions or guarantees peculiar to the French, whether there be a general idea and conception of liberty which pervades all France and is peculiar to that country.

In viewing the French institutions, which have been intended for the protection of individual rights or the preservation of liberty, I can discover none which has had a permanent existence, except the court of cassation or quashing. It is the highest court of France, possessing the power of annulling or breaking the judgments of all other courts of justice, whether in civil or criminal matters, on account of faults and flaws in the judicial forms and procedure, or of misapplications of the existing law. It has no power to examine the verdict. It resembles, therefore, the court of Westminster, in England, when the assembled judges hear questions of law, or our、 supreme court of the United States on similar occasions, and the supreme courts or courts of appeal or error in the different states. The court of cassation must necessarily sometimes judge of certain procedures of the government against individuals, and declare whether individual rights, publicly guaranteed, have been invaded. Thus it showed its power to some extent when Paris was declared in a state of siege, and the whole city was under martial law. But the high attribute of pronouncing upon the constitutionality of the laws themselves, which we revere in our supreme courts, does not belong to it, nor can its power be vigorously and broadly

Casser is the French for breaking; hence the name of the court.