Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/458

440 Lord Camden, C. J. (p. 291): "Our law holds the property of every man so sacred that no man can set his foot upon his neighbor's close without his leave. . . . The defendants have no right to avail themselves of the usage of these warrants since the revolution. . . . We can safely say there is no law in this country to justify the defendants in what they have done; if there was, it would destroy all the comforts of society; for papers are often the dearest property a man can have."

Only a little later, passing to our own side of the ocean, we again find a complete condemnation of all modern acts which impair personal liberty in one of the prime causes of the War of the Revolution. When James Otis resisted the writs of assistance, by which the attempt was being made to compel the citizens of Boston to assist the Surveyor of Duties in searching vaults, cellars, warehouses, shops, and other places for goods which might have been imported contrary to act of Parliament, he cited the common law of England as controlling acts of Parliament, as laid down by Lord Coke.

When this appeal failed, the colonists threw off the power by which they had been oppressed and adopted the remedy, the terms of which are so well stated by Mr. Justice Gray in his exhaustive review of this chapter in the history of American jurisprudence.

We are thus brought near to our own time and to the decisions of our own courts, by which personal liberty has been re-established and the right of every man to control the disposition of his own time may be maintained. It seems passing strange that one must resort to the decisions of the courts in order to find a true definition of personal liberty. One would have thought that it would have been found in the very statutes which the courts have annulled.

The very power which Parliament had assumed and which caused the colonies to rebel is now in some directions assumed by the Legislature of Massachusetts. The remedy lies in an appeal to the common law, which is the common heritage of the Englishspeaking people everywhere, and in this country has been embodied in our written Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Among the many decisions of the courts sustaining the right of every man sui juris either to combine with others in the pursuit of a common end, so long as such union or association did not impair the equal right of any one to work at his own will or "for his own hand" outside such unions or associations, none have been more lucidly or firmly presented than those given by Chief Justice Shaw, of Massachusetts. (Commonwealth vs. Hunt, 4