might be inconvenient; or it may seem
_vice versa_ to establish everything which it does not expressly take
away. It may be more advisable to leave such matters to the enlightened
discretion of a judge, awed by a censorial House of Commons. But then it
rests upon those who object to a legislative interposition to prove these
inconveniences in the particular case before them. For it would be a
most dangerous, as it is a most idle and most groundless, conceit to
assume as a general principle, that the rights and liberties of the
subject are impaired by the care and attention of the legislature to
secure them. If so, very ill would the purchase of Magna Charta have
merited the deluge of blood, which was shed in order to have the body of
English privileges defined by a positive written law. This charter, the
inestimable monument of English freedom, so long the boast and glory of
this nation, would have been at once an instrument of our servitude, and
a monument of our folly, if this principle were true. The thirty four
confirmations would have been only so many repetitions of their
absurdity, so many new links in the chain, and so many invalidations of
their right.

You cannot open your statute book without seeing positive provisions
relative to every right of the subject. This business of juries is the
subject of not fewer than a dozen. To suppose that juries are something
innate in the Constitution of Great Britain, that they have jumped, like
Minerva, out of the head of Jove in complete armour, is a weak fancy,
supported neither by precedent nor by reason. Whatever is most ancient
and venerable in our Constitution, royal prerogative, privileges of
parliament, rights of elections, authority of courts, juries, must have
been modelled according to the occasion. I spare your patience, and I
pay a compliment to your understanding, in not attempting to prove that
anything so elaborate and artificial as a jury was not the work of
chance, but a matter of institution, brought to its present state by the
joint efforts of legislative authority and juridical prudence. It need
not be ashamed of being (what in many parts of it at least it is) the
offspring of an Act of Parliament, unless it is a shame for our laws to
be the results of our legislature. Juries, which sensitively shrank from
the rude touch of parliamentary remedy, have been the subject of not
fewer than, I think, forty-three Acts of Parliament, in which they h