enough to fill us with disgust and horror.  We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers.  Upon that body and stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any scion alien to the nature of the original plant.  All the reformations we have hitherto made have proceeded upon the principle of reference to antiquity; and I hope, nay, I am persuaded, that all those which possibly 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  But, for reasons worthy of that practical wisdom which superseded their theoretic science, they preferred this positive, recorded, hereditary title to all which can be dear to the man and the citizen to that vague,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 been long possessed, and had been lately endangered.