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1215.] grasp upon half the world, grinding men down to a life-long struggle, with little joy or hope. But the work steadily goes on. With each passing year flies a prejudice; with each passing year some gigantic wrong lifts up its head and claims ans meets redress. Now, at least, the way is open to us, and cannot be mistaken; the light of Heaven shines full upon it, the obstacles grow fewer and weaker every day, the efforts to oppose them grow stronger, and the final triumph is secure.



The value and importance of Magna Charta is not to be estimated by its immediate application to ourselves. Those positive laws and institutions of later times, which secure our rights and liberties, all have their root in this charter, which first established a legal government, and asserted the claims of justice. Some modern writers who have treated of this subject, have thought fit to disregard these facts, and have spoken of Magna Charta as merely a grant obtained by the barons for their own purposes, and that its provisions were framed by them, not with a view to the restoration of the Saxon laws, but for the preservation of their own feudal privileges. It is evident that the majority of the barons, who were of Norman extraction, could have little interest in restoring the Saxon laws as such; but it is also certain that they were actuated by a strict regard for justice, and that those just principles upon which some of the laws of Edward the Confessor were founded, also formed the basis of Magna Charta.

During the reigns of the successors of the Conqueror, the king had exercised the power of exacting arbitrary payments from his subjects under the name of reliefs; of