“Taking[85] into their most serious consideration the best means for making such an establishment that their religion, laws, and liberties might not be in danger of being again subverted,” they auspicate all their proceedings by stating as some of those best means, “in the first place,” to do “as their ancestors in like cases have usually done for vindicating their ancient rights and liberties, to declare";—­and then they pray the king and queen “that it may be declared and enacted that all and singular the rights and liberties asserted and declared are the true ancient and indubitable rights and liberties of the people of this kingdom.”

You will observe, that, from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right, it has been the uniform policy of our Constitution to claim and assert our liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity,—­as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right.  By this means our Constitution preserves an unity in so great a diversity of its parts.  We have an inheritable crown, an inheritable peerage, and a House of Commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties from a long line of ancestors.

This policy appears to me to be the result of profound reflection,—­or rather the happy effect of following Nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it.  A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views.  People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.  Besides, the people of England well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement.  It leaves acquisition free; but it secures what it acquires.  Whatever advantages are obtained by a state proceeding on these maxims are locked fast as in a sort of family settlement, grasped as in a kind of mortmain forever.  By a constitutional policy working after the pattern of Nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives.  The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of Providence, are handed down to us, and from us, in the same course and order.  Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts,—­wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old or middle-aged or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation,