ngs were so ordered, that
a delinquent might be punished, but not ruined, by a fine or amercement;
because the degree of his offence, and the rank he held, were to be
taken into consideration. His freehold, his merchandise, and those
instruments by which he obtained his livelihood were made sacred from
such impositions.

A more grand reform was made with regard to the administration of
justice. The kings in those days seldom resided long in one place, and
their courts followed their persons. This erratic justice must have been
productive of infinite inconvenience to the litigants. It was now
provided that civil suits, called _Common Pleas_, should be fixed to
some certain place. Thus one branch of jurisdiction was separated from
the king's court, and detached from his person. They had not yet come to
that maturity of jurisprudence as to think this might be made to extend
to criminal law also, and that the latter was an object of still greater
importance. But even the former may be considered as a great revolution.
A tribunal, a creature of mere law, independent of personal power, was
established; and this separation of a king's authority from his person
was a matter of vast consequence towards introducing ideas of freedom,
and confirming the sacredness and majesty of laws.

But the grand article, and that which cemented all the parts of the
fabric of liberty, was this,--that "no freeman shall be taken, or
imprisoned, or disseized, or outlawed, or banished, or in any wise
destroyed, but by judgment of his peers."

There is another article of nearly as much consequence as the former,
considering the state of the nation at that time, by which it is
provided that the barons shall grant to their tenants the same liberties
which they had stipulated for themselves. This prevented the kingdom
from degenerating into the worst imaginable government, a feudal
aristocracy. The English barons were not in the condition of those
great princes who had made the French monarchy so low in the preceding
century, or like those who reduced the Imperial power to a name. They
had been brought to moderate bounds, by the policy of the first and
second Henrys, and were not in a condition to set up for petty
sovereigns by an usurpation equally detrimental to the crown and the
people. They were able to act only in confederacy; and this common cause
made it necessary to consult the common good, and to study popularity by
the equity of their proce