liberty. Yet the first would seem in some degree to depend
upon our Saxon mode of trial by our peers, upon the
stipulations of the great Norman charters, upon the practice
and the statute of Habeas Corpus,--a principle native to our
common law, but established by the Stuarts; nor in a careful
perusal of the Bill of Rights, or in an impartial scrutiny of
the subsequent legislation of those times, though some
diminution of our political franchises must be confessed, is
it easy to discover any increase of our civil privileges. To
those indeed who believe that the English nation,--at all
times a religious and Catholic people, but who even in the
days of the Plantagenets were anti-papal,--were in any danger
of again falling under the yoke of the Pope of Rome in the
reign of James the Second, religious liberty was perhaps
acceptable, though it took the shape of a discipline which at
once anathematized a great portion of the nation, and
virtually establishing Puritanism in Ireland, laid the
foundation of those mischiefs which are now endangering the
empire.

That the last of the Stuarts had any other object in his
impolitic manoeuvres, than an impracticable scheme to blend
the two churches, there is now authority to disbelieve. He
certainly was guilty of the offence of sending an envoy openly
to Rome, who, by the bye, was received by the Pope with great
discourtesy; and her Majesty Queen Victoria, whose
Protestantism cannot be doubted, for it is one of her chief
titles to our homage, has at this time a secret envoy at the
same court: and that is the difference between them: both
ministers doubtless working however fruitlessly for the same