taxation slowly developed into an issue of constitutionalism
rather than of legislative policy. As in England, the immediate question
affected the power of the Crown to give to the customs inspectors the
power to make general searches and seizures, to enforce the navigation
laws. In 1761 James Otis, of Massachusetts, made a fateful speech before
the colonial legislature, in which, asserting the illegality of the
search warrants on the ground that they violated the constitutional
rights of Englishmen to protection in their own homes, he asserted that
Acts of Parliament which violated the sanctity of the home were void and
that, more specifically, they violated the charter granted to
Massachusetts. Asserting the doctrine which at that time was the
doctrine of the English common law, as stated by Coke and three other
Chief Justices, he said:

"To say the parliament is absolute and arbitrary is a contradiction.
The Parliament cannot make two and two five. Omnipotency cannot do
it.... Parliaments are in all cases to declare what is for the good
of the whole; but it is not the declaration of parliament that makes
it so: there must be in every instance a higher authority, viz.,
GOD. Should an Act of Parliament be against any of His natural laws,
which are immutably true, their declaration would be contrary to
eternal truth, equity and justice, and consequently void; and so it
would be adjudged by the Parliament itself, when convinced of their
mistake."

It is a curious fact that in the reaction from the tyranny of the
Stuarts your country abandoned this principle of the common law by
substituting for the omnipotence of the Crown the omnipotence of
Parliament, while in my country the somewhat vague and unworkable
principle of the common law, which gave the judiciary the power to
invalidate an act of the legislature, when against natural reason and
justice, was developed into the great principle, without which
institutions in an heterogeneous and widely scattered democracy would be
unworkable, namely that the powers of government are strictly defined,
and that neither the executive, the legislative, nor the judicial
departments of the government can go beyond the precise limits
established by the fundamental law. Like the common law, the
Constitution was thus the result of a slow evolution. Mr. Gladstone, in
his oft-quoted remark, gave an erroneous impression when he said:

"As the