free men who maintain their own personal liberty will in the end secure the best positions and the most lucrative occupation. These efforts, so long as they have a temporary effect, tend to the privation of the very men who move for the enactment of restrictive statutes or who subject themselves to the rules of the associations which limit them in the use of their own faculties.
It is the very province of the political economist to expose the wrong, even if it offends the very men who wrong themselves, and to appeal to the decisions of the courts in order to establish their rights as well as the rights of those who will not submit to their restrictions.
It does not yet seem to have occurred to any of those who are oppressed by such public statutes, or by the rules and regulations of private associations by which the attempt is made to restrict the free use of time, that a remedy may be found in the courts for any infringement of personal liberty, under whatever pretense the public act may have been passed. It may, therefore, be expedient to pass in review some of the cases in which this issue has already been joined.
In order that the firm foundation on which personal liberty rests may be fully comprehended, we may go back almost to the beginning, and we must recur once again to a familiar chapter of the English-speaking people.
The barons who wrested the charter of English liberty, the Magna Charta,, from King John, nearly eight hundred years ago, were only maintaining the long existing and established rights of the free men of England against the usurpation of a despotic ruler. Strange that the counterpart of that ruler may be found to-day in the legislatures of our own time.
Personal liberty was established in the Magna Charta in these terms:
"No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised, or outlawed, or exiled, or anyways destroyed; nor will we go upon him, nor will we send upon him, unless by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land."[1]
In the brief limits permitted for the statement of this case we may not follow the course of history, century by century; but we must pass at once to a very noted instance in which the rights of the people were established by the English courts, the "case of monopolies," so well known to all students of law and so often cited. In the time of Elizabeth, the Queen had under taken to grant to the plaintiff the monopoly of making and selling playing-cards. The court held this grant to be void, and in giving the opinion
- ↑ "Nullus liber homo capiatur, vec imprisonetur, aut dissaisiatur, aut utlagetur, aut exuleter, aut aliquo modo destruatur, nee super eum ibimus, nee super cum mittemus, nisi per legale judicium parium suorum, vel per legem terræ."
