traint, can alone supply. If no one were permitted to travel
on the high road without a licence, or, as now so usual, without a
passport, if no one could keep arms without a registry, if every one
might be indefinitely detained on suspicion, the evil doers of society
would be materially impeded, but at the expense, to a certain degree, of
every man's freedom and enjoyment. Freedom being but a means to the
greatest good, times might arise when it must yield to the security of
still higher blessings; but the immediate question is, whether such were
the state of society in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Now,
that it was lawless and insecure, comparatively with our own times or
the times of our fathers, is hardly to be disputed. But if it required
that arbitrary government which the king's council were anxious to
maintain, the representatives of the commons in parliament, knights and
burgesses, not above the law, and much interested in the conservation of
property, must have complained very unreasonably for more than a hundred
years. They were apparently as well able to judge as our writers can be;
and if they reckoned a trial by jury at _nisi prius_ more likely, on the
whole, to insure a just adjudication of a civil suit, than one before
the great officers of state and other constituent members of the
ordinary council, it does not seem clear to me that we have a right to
assert the contrary. This mode of trial by jury, as has been seen in
another place, had acquired, by the beginning of the fifteenth century,
its present form; and considering the great authority of the judges of
assise, it may not, probably, have given very frequent occasion for
complaint of partiality or corrupt influence.

NOTE XII. Page 156.

The learned author of the Inquiry into the Rise and Growth of the Royal
Prerogative in England has founded his historical theory on the
confusion which he supposes to have grown up between the ideal king of
the constitution and the personal king on the throne. By the former he
means the personification of abstract principles, sovereign power, and
absolute justice, which the law attributes to the _genus_ king, but
which flattery or other motives have transferred to the possessor of the
crown for the time being, and have thus changed the Teutonic _cyning_,
the first man of the commonwealth, the man of the highest weregild, the
man who was so much responsible that he might be sued for damages in his
own co