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Political.

Arbitrary.

RUNNEMEDE.

Reference.

Succouring.

Proclaimed.
Gratification.

THE political history of John may be read in the most durable of antiquities, the records of the kingdom; and the people may read the most remarkable of these records whenever they please to look upon it. Magna Charta,' the great charter of England, entire as at the hour it was written, is preserved, not for reference on doubtful questions of right, not to be proclaimed at marketcrosses or to be read in churches, as in the time of Edward I., but for the gratification of a just curiosity and an honest national pride.

The humblest in the land may look upon that document, day by day, in the British Museum; which more than six hundred years ago declared that "no freeman shall be arrested or imprisoned, or dispossessed of his tenement or outlawed or exiled or in any manner proceeded against, unless by the legal judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land." This is the foundation of the statute upon statute, and of what is as stringent as statute, the common law, through which for six hundred years we have been struggling to breathe the breath of freedom, and we have not struggled in vain. The Great Charter is in Latin, written in a beautiful hand.

Runnemede, or Runingmede as the charter has it, was, according to Matthew of Westminster, a place where treaties concerning the peace of the kingdom had been often made. The name distinctly signifies a place of council. Rucne-med is an Anglo-Saxon compound word, meaning the council meadow. Runnemede is a fitting place for the cradle of English liberty. Denham, who from his Cooper's Hill looked down upon the Thames, wandering past this mead to become "the world's exchange," somewhat tamely speaks of the plain at his feet :

"Here was that Charter sealed wherein the crown
All marks of arbitrary power lays down;

Tyrant and slave, those names of hate and fear,
The happier style of king and subject bear;
Happy when both to the same centre move,
When kings give liberty and subjects love."

Our liberty was not so won. It was wrested from kings, and not given by them; and the love we bestow upon those who are the central point of our liberty is the homage of reason to security. That security has made the Thames "the world's exchange;" that security has raised up the great city which lies

like a mist below Cooper's Hill; that security has caused the towers of Windsor, which we see from the same hill, to rise up in new splendour, instead of crumbling into ruin like many a stronghold of feudal oppression.

Our prosperity is the child of our free institutions; and the child has gone forward strengthening and succouring the parent. Yet the iron men who won this charter of liberties dreamt not of the day when a greater power than their own, the power of the merchants and the villeins, would rise up to keep what they had sworn to win, upon the altar of St. Edmundsbury. The Fitz-Walter, and De Roos, and De Clare, and De Percy, and De Mandeville, and De Vescy, and De Mowbray, and De Montacute, and De Beauchamp,-these great progenitors of our English nobility,—compelled the despot to put his seal to the Charter of Runnemede. But another order of men, whom they of the pointed shield and the mascled armour would have despised as slaves, have kept, and will keep, God willing, what they won on the 15th of June, in the year of grace 1215. The thing has rooted into our English earth like the Ankerwyke yew on the opposite bank of the Thames, which is still vigorous, though held to be older than the great day of Runnemede.-KNIGHT'S 'Halfhours of English History.'

1. Magna Charta was signed in 1215.

2. One of the principal residences of the Sovereigns of England.

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It is remarkable that the two greatest and most salutary social revolutions which have taken place in England, that revolution which, in the thirteenth century, put an end to the tyranny of nation over nation, and that revolution which, a few generations later, put an end to the property of man in man, were silently and imperceptibly effected. They struck contemporary observers with no surprise, and have received from historians a very scanty measure of attention. They were brought about neither by legislative regulation nor by physical force.

Moral causes noiselessly effaced, first the distinction between Norman and Saxon, and then the distinction between master and slave. None can venture to fix the precise moment at

which either distinction ceased. Some faint traces of the old Norman feeling might perhaps have been found late in the fourteenth century. Some faint traces of the institution of villenage were detected by the curious so late as the days of the Stuarts; nor has that institution ever, to this hour, been abolished by statute.

It would be most unjust not to acknowledge that the chief agent in these two great deliverances was religion; and it may perhaps be doubted whether a purer religion might not have been found a less efficient agent. The benevolent spirit of the Christian morality is undoubtedly adverse to distinctions of caste. But to the Church of Rome, such distinctions are peculiarly odious, for they are incompatible with other distinctions which are essential to her system. She ascribes to every priest a mysterious dignity which entitles him to the reverence of every layman, and she does not consider any man as disqualified, by reason of his nation or of his family, for the priesthood. Her doctrines respecting the sacerdotal character, however erroneous they may be, have repeatedly mitigated some of the worst evils which can afflict society.

That superstition cannot be regarded as unmixedly noxious which, in regions cursed by the tyranny of race over race, creates an aristocracy altogether independent of race, inverts the relation between the oppressor and the oppressed, and compels the hereditary master to kneel before the spiritual tribunal of the hereditary bondman. To this day, in some countries where negro slavery exists, Popery appears in advantageous contrast to other forms of Christianity. It is notorious that the antipathy between the European and African races is by no means so strong at Rio Janeiro as at Washington.

In our own country this peculiarity of the Roman Catholic system produced, during the middle ages, many salutary effects. It is true that, shortly after the battle of Hastings, Saxon prelates and abbots were violently deposed, and that ecclesiastical adventurers from the Continent were intruded by hundreds into lucrative benefices. Yet even then pious divines of Norman blood raised their voices against such a violation of the constitution of the church, refused to accept mitres from the hands of the Conqueror, and charged him, on the peril of his soul, not to forget that the vanquished islanders were his fellow-Christians. The first protector whom the English found among the dominant caste was Archbishop Anselm. At a time when the English name was a reproach, and when all the civil and inilitary dignities of the kingdom were supposed to belong exclusively to the countrymen of the Conqueror, the despised race

learned, with transports of delight, that one of themselves, Nicholas Breakspear, had been elevated to the papal throne, and had held out his foot to be kissed by ambassadors sprung from the noblest houses of Normandy. It was a national as well as a religious feeling that drew great multitudes to the shrine of Becket, the first Englishman who, since the Conquest, had been terrible to the foreign tyrants.

A successor of Becket was foremost among those who obtained that charter which secured at once the privileges of the Norman barons and of the Saxon yeomanry. How great a part the Catholic ecclesiastics subsequently had in the abolition of villenage we learn from the unexceptionable testimony of Sir Thomas Smith, one of the ablest Protestant counsellors of Elizabeth. When the dying slaveholder asked for the last sacraments, his spiritual attendants regularly adjured him, as he loved his soul, to emancipate his brethren for whom Christ had died. So successfully had the Church used her formidable machinery, that before the Reformation came, she had enfranchised almost all the bondmen in the kingdom except her own, who, to do her ustice, seem to have been very tenderly treated.

There can be no doubt that, when these two great revolutions had been effected, our forefathers were by far the best-governed people in Europe. During three hundred years the social system had been in a constant course of improvement. Under the first Plantagenets1 there had been barons able to bid defiance to the sovereign, and peasants degraded to the level of the swine and oxen which they tended. The exorbitant power of the baron had been gradually reduced. The condition of the peasant had been gradually elevated. Between the aristocracy and the working people had sprung up a middle class, agricultural and commercial. There was still, it may be, more inequality than is favourable to the happiness and virtue of our species; but no man was altogether above the restraints of law, and no man was altogether below its protection.-MACAULAY.

1 Plantagenet is the surname of the royal family of England from Henry II. to Richard III. inclusive. The origin of the name is involved in deep obscurity. The best antiquaries derive it from the well-known story of the Earl of Anjou, the ancestor of the royal race, who having made a pilgrimage to Rome, where he was scourged with broom twigs, assumed the name of Plantagenista (literally a broomtwig), which his descendants retained. The name Plantagenet belongs to the noble house of Buckingham.

SONNET.

DEPLORABLE his lot who tills the ground,
His whole life long tills it, with heartless toil
Of villein-service, passing with the soil
To each new master, like a steer or hound,
Or like a rooted tree, or stone earth-bound!
But mark how gladly through their own domains,
The monks relax or break these iron chains;
While Mercy, uttering, through their voice, a sound
Echoed in Heaven, cries out, "Ye chiefs, abate
These legalized oppressions! Man, whose name
And nature God disdained not; Man, whose soul
Christ died for, cannot forfeit his high claim
To live and move exempt from all control,
Which fellow-feeling doth not mitigate!"

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THE Norman conquerors of England were rapidly absorbed by the conquered people; and the union of the two races took place at a period much earlier than has generally been stated by our historians. Though beaten in the field, after a long and stern struggle for their independence, and though perhaps decimated by seven dreadful years of war and carnage, the Saxons remained incomparably more numerous than their invaders, and it was considered an easier and a wiser task to conciliate them than to exterminate them. From his first coming into England, and, indeed, before his arrival, William the Conqueror had a strong party among the Saxon and Dano-Saxon thanes; this party rejoiced at his coming, and grew in numbers and strength after the battle of Hastings. To keep it steady to his interest, William at a very early period began to give these great thanes Norman wives.

Several of these brides were of the highest rank. Thus the Conqueror gave his own niece Judith in marriage to the great Saxon Earl Waltheof, whose warlike qualities and great popularity with the Saxon people, might have made him formidable as an enemy many years after the catastrophe

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