great Republic in
America, we brought with us the laws and the liberties, which formed
a part of our heritage as Britons. We brought with us the idea and
the form of our legislative assemblies, composed of elected
representatives of the people; we brought with us the right of
petition, as the necessary incident of such institutions. For when,
in the whole history of our father-land, has the right of petition
ever undergone debate and question? Go back to the old parliamentary
rolls, coeval with Magna Charta; peruse the black-letter volumes in
which the early laws and practices of the English monarchy are seen
to be recorded; and so far as you find a government to exist, you
find the right to petition that government existing also as an
undeniable franchise and birthright of the humblest in the land. The
Normans came over, lance in hand, burning and trampling down every
thing before them, and cutting off the Saxon dynasty and the Saxon
nobles at the edge of the sword; but the right of petition remained
untouched. In all succeeding times, from the day when the barons at
Runnymede pledged themselves to deny to no man redress of his
grievances, through every vicissitude of revolution and of war, down
to the day when our forefathers abandoned their native country, the
same right of petition continued without challenge. In the next
reign, it is true, that of the misguided Charles I, the king invaded
the public liberties; and he expiated the wrong, as he merited, by a
felon's death. After the Commonwealth had passed away, came the
petition of right, and with it the statute of the 13 Charles II,
distinctly recognising the old right of petition, and regulating the
mode of its exercise; and again, after the dethronement and exile of
James II, the Bill of Rights and the statute of I William and Mary,
again recognising and regulating the right of petition as it has
been exercised at all times throughout Great Britain.

Now, I ask gentlemen to point me, in all or any of the periods under
review, to the precedents of a refusal by Parliament to receive
petitions. I invite them to turn over the histories of parliamentary
proceeding, and cite me the examples of petitions being thrust out
of the House of Commons or of Lords, at the instant of presentation,
on the ground that the prayer of the petition ought not to be
granted. Will they do it? Can they do it? Is it not perfectly
notorious, on the contrary, that every subject is freely a