bly 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,[84] are industrious to prove the pedigree
of our liberties. They endeavor to prove that the ancient charter, the
Magna Charta of King John, was connected with another positive charter
from Henry the First, and that both the one and the other were nothing
more than a reaffirmance 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 which 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 the First, 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reasons worthy of that practical wisdom which superseded their theoretic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 be