Page:The general principles of constitutional law in the United States of America.djvu/64

6 compelled to set fire to the vessel by means of which he had offended, and in other colonies the taxed commodity was either refused a landing, or not suffered to be sold after the landing had been effected; and the tax law was by these means completely nullified.

Liberty a Birthright.—The resistance in the cases mentioned, and in some others, was grounded on the claim that the colonists, as Englishmen, according to the Constitution of the realm, were entitled to certain rights which the government was attempting to override by the exercise of tyrannical power. The evidence of these rights was to be found in part in certain historical documents which in both England and America had been looked upon and revered as the charters of liberty. The first of these was

Magna Charta, extorted from King John in 1215, as a restriction upon what was then an almost unlimited kingly power; the most important provision of which was, that "No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseized or outlawed or banished or anyways destroyed, nor will the King pass upon him or commit him to prison, unless by the judgment of his peers or the law of the land." In the same instrument is foreshadowed parliamentary taxation in the clause which requires the common consent of the realm to the levy of unusual burdens. Grounded upon this charter the fabric of constitutional liberty was slowly and patiently erected; parliamentary institutions acquired form and strength under the House of Lancaster; and though the promise of a regular administration of the law was as often violated as kept, the right of the subject to its benefits was never surrendered, and at length, at the beginning of the reign of Charles I., it received further assurance and confirmation in the royal assent to