CHAPTER II.

ACQUIREMENT AND LOSS OF RIGHTS.

Rights acquired by Birth.-Rights of the Sovereign to services of the Subject.— Laws affecting Aliens.-Rights of Foreigners.-Greater Naturalization.—Minor Naturalization.-Denization.

THE rights of an Englishman were originally acquired only by being born in England. By the law obtaining in the middle ages the children of ambassadors, although born abroad, acquired the rights of native-born Englishmen. A statute of Edward III. ensures to all children of Englishmen born in a foreign country, the like rights of inheritance as enjoyed by those born in England. On the other hand, the children of English parents born during exile, on the restoration of Charles II., acquired full rights of citizenship by the instrumentality of an act of parliament conferring naturalization. In conformity with modern statutes, all legitimate children whose father or grandfather possessed or enjoyed the rights of Englishmen, are English subjects, unless, at the date of their birth, their parents were either banished for high treason, or were in the service of an enemy of England. The children of foreigners born in England are likewise, by birth, English subjects. A ship under the English flag is regarded as a portion of English soil.

According to the feudal conception prevailing in England as to the relationship of the subject, the sovereign may withdraw protection from any subject whatever, but the subject never can, of his own free will, throw off his allegiance; just as by birth he obtains the rights of an Englishman, so does the sovereign coincidently acquire claims to his services.

The duties towards the sovereign attach to the subject wheresoever he may go; he may abjure the realm but not the governing prince; he may abandon the fatherland but not the parent thereof.* "Nemo potest exuere patriam." By outlawry an Englishman merely forfeits the protection of his country, but not

*Antley s Guide to the Hist. of the Laws of the Constitution of England, pp. 94-5.

the country itself, an English fugitive by the mere fact of flight, or prolonged absence from England would never therefore lose his native rights. The enactments against aliens remain during times of peace a dead letter.

The Alien Act (6 Will. IV., c. 11) directing the registration of foreigners, requires every captain of a vessel to declare to the customs' officials whether he has any foreigners on board. Every foreigner, on landing, is bound to produce his passport, and furnish all needful particulars, he thereupon receives a certificate, and his name is registered; there is no penalty, however, attaching to non-registration. In 1842, out of 11,600 foreigners landing, only 6084 were registered under the act. Any foreigner may, on leaving the country, be required to produce the certificate of registration, but a foreigner, on proving that he has resided more than three years in England, does not require any such certificate. In times of peace travelling in England without a passport or other document is as a matter of course; every foreigner, however, is asked by the captain of the vessel bringing him to England to give up his name. In troublous times these regulations revive, and are rendered more stringent by means of special enactments passed to suit the emergency. In time of war alien enemies only travel under a safe-conduct granted by the queen under the great seal, and registered in the Court of Chancery.*

Not only has England offered an asylum to foreigners at all times, but she has likewise abstained from legislating to oppress aliens. A tax for residence has never been imposed. By Magna Charta, freedom of commerce was guaranteed to foreign merchants. In times of war the kings did emancipate themselves from the humane laws and customs towards strangers. In 1415, certain members of the companies of Florentines, Venetians, and Luccans, dwelling in London, who refused to make a moneypresent to the king were committed to the Fleet prison. Even at the present day, foreigners can only inherit personal property, from the fact that the inheritance of real property would involve a feudal relationship to the king, which is naturally withheld from foreigners. By 7 and 8 Vict., c. 66, sec. 5, every foreigner belonging to a state in friendly relation with England, is allowed to * Bowyer, p. 163. Proceedings and Ordinances, ii., + Hallam, M. A., ii., p. 329.

p. 165.

hold a lease of land and houses for twenty-one years for occupation or business, and to follow any kind of trade. He enjoys the municipal rights of an English subject, is liable to the municipal taxes, but cannot record his vote for the election of members to parliament.

The Act of 1844 excludes foreigners from a seat in parliament and from the privy council; a special resolution of parliament may, however, accord the right to sit, and authority to act in both these bodies. The wife of an Englishman or of a naturalized subject becomes, ipso jure, naturalized; sailors, also, who have served two years on board a British ship, foreign Jews, and protestants, who have resided seven years in an American colony, become forthwith naturalized; they cannot, however, sit in parliament or in the privy council. The restrictions in regard to religion, and the obligation to receive the sacrament previous to naturalization, and to take the oaths of allegiance, abjuration, and supremacy have been abolished.

Full naturalization, granting likewise political rights, is only obtainable by special Act of Parliament; lesser naturalization is likewise procurable by an act, containing the clause that the person naturalized is excluded from parliament and the privy council; should the act, however, contain no such clause the naturalization is complete.

The usual form of naturalization is now by certificate from the Secretary of State for the Home Department; such naturalization does not enable the person obtaining it to sit in parliament or in the privy council: generally speaking, further restrictive clauses are appended. As the secretary of state has the power, on granting naturalization, to append optional limitations in relation to political rights, it is generally confined to the right of inheriting and acquiring land, and obtaining an English passport. An alien may, to a certain extent, be made an English subject, under patent from the king, and is termed a " denizen;" he may take lands by purchase or demise, but not by inheritance; and his children born before denization cannot succeed to his real estate; a denizen cannot be a member of the privy council or either house of parliament, or have any office of trust, civil or military, or be capable of any grants of land from the crown.

*Bowyer, p. 163.

CHAPTER III.

THE DIFFERENT CLASSES OF THE POPULATION.

(A.) Social Inequality, and Equality before the Law.-Aristocratic Spirit of the Nation. The Barons of Magna Charta.-Nobility in the Continental sense does not exist in England.-Importance of Property.-Wars of the Roses.-Recent Origin of the Peerage.-Halo of the Aristocracy.-(B.) Thanes and Ceorls.— Vassals of the Norman kings.-French Feudal Polity.-Powerlessness of the Norman Nobility.-Entailed Property.-Decline of Feudalism.-The Non-free.Abolition of Serfdom Period Undetermined.-Limitation of Free Workers.— Yeomen. (C.) Freemen and Slaves.-Misalliance Unknown to the Law.—Privileges of Peers. Titles of the Nobility.-Inheritance of the Peerage.-Peeresses in their own right.-Elevation to the Peerage.-Connection of Nobles and Commoners.-The Gentry, Baronets, Order of the Bath, Knights, Esquires, Yeomen, Farmers, Tradesmen.

ENGLAND is the land where the greatest social inequality prevails coupled with the greatest equality of the citizen before the law. There is no true-born Englishwoman, however humble in the social scale, whom the Prince of Wales, with the permission of the Queen, might not marry to-morrow, and whose children would consequently with perfect right, ascend the throne of England. On the other hand, England possesses the haughtiest and most powerful aristocracy in the world; but being a political institution and not a political caste, and its roots penetrating into the lowest strata of society, the nation at large has remained, both as to its customs and history, aristocratic to the very core. "You may take away the present house of lords and destroy the titles of nobility, and light up a bonfire with peers' coronets and ermines; despite all attempts, the aristocracy would remain stronger than ever, for the source of the aristocracy consists not in painted chambers or crimson woolsack, or in orders of ribands, coronets, and titles; your power, my friends, is in yourselves, your power is grounded on the aristocratic spirit and aristocratic inclinations which govern you."*

To the aristocracy, as an institution which has developed with the most renowned pages of the older history, the nation owes the preservation of its national liberties, but not to the aris

* Bulwer, England and the English.

tocrats for the time being. Chatham once said of the barons who had achieved Magna Charta, "My lords, it is to your ancestors, it is to the English barons that we are indebted for the laws and constitution we possess, their virtues were rude and uncultivated, but they were great and sincere. Their understandings were as little polished as their manners, but they had hearts to distinguish right from wrong; they had heads to distinguish truth from falsehood; they understood the rights of humanity and they had spirit to maintain them. My lords, I think that history has not done justice to their conduct when they obtained from their sovereign the great acknowledgment of national rights contained in Magna Charta; they did not confine it to themselves alone, but delivered it as a common blessing to the whole people."

The families of the great barons have died out, but although impelled by necessity to appeal to the common law of England against the encroachments of a despot, all needful subordination to the general law has ever been upheld by the aristocracy, which has both preserved England from the sway of petty dynasties and the scourge of small seignories, as well as, previous to the revolution, the domination of class against class. England is not blessed with a nobility in the special sense of a "caste" separated by law from the remainder of the community; after the first Anglo-Norman age, nobility of blood ceased to exist, and the laws and customs of England knew of no distinction save that between bondman and free.

"There is no part, perhaps, of our constitution so admirable as this equality of civil rights; this 'isonomia' which the philosophers of Greece only hoped to find in democratical government. From the beginning our law has been no respecter of persons. It screens not the gentleman of ancient lineage from the judgment of an ordinary jury, nor from ignominious punishment. It confers not, it never did confer, those unjust immunities from public burdens, which the superior orders arrogated to themselves upon the continent. Thus, while the privileges of our peers, as hereditary legislators of a free people, are incomparably more valuable and dignified in their nature, they are far less invidious in their exercise, than those of any other nobility in Europe."* "The making of gentlemen," says Thomas Smith, "is not amiss, and has not

* Hallam, M. A., 11. 347.