Self-government, general as well as local, is indispensable to our liberty, but interference and dictation are the essence of absolutism. Monarchical absolutisms presume to do everything and to provide for everything; and Robespierre, in his " great speech" for the restoration of the Supreme Being, said-The function of government is to direct the moral and physical forces of the nation. For this purpose the aim of a constitutional government is the republic.3

Liberty requires that every one should be judged by his coinmon court. All despots insist on extraordinary courts, courts of commission, and an easy application of martial law.

Forcible expatriation or deportation

beyond the seas by the executive, is looked upon with peculiar horror by all freemen. The English were roused by it to resistance; Napoleon the Third began his absolute reign with exile and deportation. So did the Greek factions, because no " opposition " was known, invariably banish their opponents when they had the power of doing so. With them it was the bungling business of factions; moderns know better, and if they return to it, it is because despotism is a thing full of fear and love of show.

How great an offence it is to deprive a man of his lawful court, and to judge him by aught else than by the laws of the land, now in the middle of the nineteenth century, will appear the more forcibly, if the reader will bring to his mind that passage of Magna Charta, which appeared to Chatham worth all the classics, and if he will remember the year when the

The words of Robespierre are perfectly clear as an illustration of what has been stated in the text; otherwise, I own, the sense is not perfectly apparent.

Grea Charter was carried. The passage, so pregnant to the mind of Chatham, is this:

"No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or be disseised of his freehold or liberties, or free customs, or be outlawed or exiled, or any otherwise destroyed; nor will we (the king) pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man, justice or right."

Publicity is a condition without which liberty cannot live. The moment it had been concluded by the present government of France to root out civil freedom, it was ordained that neither the remarks of the members of the legislative corps, nor the pleadings in the courts of justice, should be reported in the papers. Modern political publicity, however, consists chiefly in publication through the papers. We acknowledge this practically by the fact, that although our courts are never closed, yet, for particular reasons arising out of the case under consideration, the publication of the proceedings is sometimes prohibited by the judge until the close of the trial, but never beyond it.

Liberty stands in need of the legal precedent, and Charles the First pursued Cotton because he furnished Pym and other patriots with precedents, while the present French government has excluded instruction in history from the plan of general education. History, in a certain point of view, may be called the great precedent. History is of all branches the most nourishing for public life and liberty. It furnishes a strong pabulum, and incites by great examples removed beyond all party or selfish views. The favourite book of Chatham

4

Very scandalous judicial cases, offensive to public morals, are in France conducted with closed doors.

was Plutarch, and his son educated himself upon Thucydides.5 The best historians have been produced by liberty, and the despot is consistent when he wishes to shackle the noble muse.

Sincere civil liberty requires that the legislature should have the initiative. All governments reluctant to grant full liberty have withheld it, and one of the first things decreed by Louis Napoleon after the second of December was, that the " legislative corps should discuss such propositions of laws only as the council of state should send to it. The council of state, however, is a mere body of officers appointed and discharged at the will of the ruler.

Liberty requires that government do not form a body permanently and essentially separated from the people; all modern absolute rulers have resorted to a number of .distinctions — titles, ribbons, orders, peacock feathers and buttons, uniforms, or whatever other means of separating individuals from the people at large may seem expedient.

Liberty requires the trial by jury; consequently one of the first attacks which arbitrary power makes upon freedom is regularly directed against that trial. There is now a law in preparation in France, of which the outlines have been published, and which will place the jurors under the almost exclusive influence of the government.

Liberty requires, as we have seen, a candid and wellguaranteed trial for treason; all despotic governments, on the contrary, endeavour to break down these guarantees in particular, and either to arrogate the power of condemning political offenders without trial, or at least to strip the trial for treason of its best guarantees.

5 So Bishop Tomlinson tells us in the Life of his pupil.

But we might go through the whole list of safeguards and principles of liberty, and find that in each case absolutism does the opposite.

If the American peruses the Declaration of Independence, he will find there, in the complaints of our forefathers, almost a complete list of those rights, privileges, and guarantees which they held dearest and most essential to liberty; for they believed that nearly every guarantee had been assailed.

CHAPTER XXIV.

GALLICAN LIBERTY. SPREADING OF LIBERTY.

HAVING considered Anglican liberty, it will be proper for us to examine the French type of civil freedom, or Gallican liberty.

In speaking here of Gallican liberty, we mean, of course, that liberty which, either in reality, if we shall find that at any period it has taken actual root, or in theory, if it have remained such, and never practically developed itself, is characteristically French. Liberty

has sprouted in France as in other countries. People have felt there, as all over Europe, that the administration of justice ought to be independent of the other branches of government. The separation of the three great functions of government was proclaimed by the first constituent assembly. But the question here is, whether any of these or other endeavours to establish liberty have been consolidated into permanent institutions, whether they have been allowed to develop themselves, and whether they were or are peculiar to the Gallican tribe, or were adopted from another system of developed civil liberty, as we adopt the whole or parts of an order of architecture or a philosophical system; and if we find no such institutions or guarantees peculiar to the French, whether there be a general idea and conception of liberty which pervades all France, and is peculiar to that country.