James II. evidently considered the Act, as, if not introductory of a new element of the Constitution, eminently conducive to the People's safety, or as he deemed it, their licentiousness. Among the Stuart papers is a document dated A.D. 1692 (shortly before James's death), and headed, "For my Son, the Prince of Wales," containing these words: ""Twas a great misfortune to the People as well as to the Crown, the passing of the Habeas Corpus Act; since it obliged the Crown to keep a greater force on foot than it needed otherwise to preserve the government, and encouraged disaffected, turbulent, and unquiet spirits to contrive and carry with more security to themselves their wicked designs. 'Twas contrived and carried by the Earl of Shaftesbury to that intent."

It is a valuable testimony to the constitutional importance of the Habeas Corpus Act of Charles II., that, in America, besides the adoption of the Common Law of Habeas Corpus which was in force prior to the Revolution of the United States, the statute of Charles II. has been made the basis of laws enacted with the same object both in the general Constitution of the Union, and in those of most of its separate States. Chancellor Kent expresses a just eulogium on the practical merits of the Statute, that "nothing similar to it can be found in any of the free commonwealths of antiquity; its excellence consisting in the easy, prompt, and efficient remedy afforded for all unlawful imprisonment, not leaving personal liberty to rest for its security upon general and abstract declarations of right."

II. Miscellaneous Safeguards of Personal Liberty.`

Liberty of the Person is not so securely protected by the law of Habeas Corpus but that additional safeguards of it have been established since the reign of Charles II., with advantage to the Community. The Habeas Corpus Act is silent upon the subject of the amount of bail. It had been provided in Magna Charta,

that if a freeman be amerced, it shall be salvo contenemento suo, and if a villein, salvo wanagio suo, which had been held by the Judges of Charles II. to be confined to amerciaments, and not to extend to fines; hence much less would they, in matters of bail, have paid any regard to countenances and wanages1. The Habeas Corpus Act might easily have been made a dead letter by an abuse of the discretionary power confided by it of bailing; the party imprisoned when brought before a Judge being entitled to be set free only on condition of being bailed, the amount being left to the Judge's discretion, who might have none. It may be deemed an important security for liberty gained since the reign of Charles II., that it is declared, in the Bill of Rights, that "excessive bail ought not to be required."

The Liberty of the Person has been much advanced since the reign of Charles II., in consequence of an augmentation of the discretionary power of bailing, which has been very much enlarged, particularly by a Statute of Victoria, even since Blackstone enumerated ten species of offences, persons charged with which were, in his time, "clearly not admissible to bail by Justices of the Peace," besides, as he writes, "others of a dubious nature." Nor would Junius, in the present day, be tolerated in fulminating a series of letters against Lord Mansfield, for bailing, in his capacity of Chief Justice of the King's Bench, Eyre (who, Junius writes, he presumes was a Scotchman) for larceny, seeing that he had been taken in the mainour. An anonymous utterer of such invectives in the present day would leave no doubt, among the inquisitive, that he was not a lawyer.

General Warrants were in use in the time of Charles II.; they were supposed by Lord Camden to have originated with Chief Justice Scroggs and his colleagues, and were chiefly issued against the authors, printers, and publishers of alleged libels, leaving it for the messenger of the Press, or constables, to supply the names; thus allowing the lowest functionaries of justice to

1 See these terms explained in Barrington's Observations on Magna Charta.

support their conjectures on questions of authorship which may have perplexed the literary world, by manacles, bars and bolts. The unconstitutional character of General Warrants was not acknowledged till the year 1766; and, most probably, the last general warrant which will ever have been issued in England will have been one signed by the Earl of Halifax, commanding four of his Majesty's messengers in ordinary to "make strict and diligent search for the authors, printers and publishers of a seditious and treasonable paper entitled The North Briton, No. 45, and them, or any of them having found, to apprehend and seize."

III. Removals of the Poor.

Lord Coke writes of a numerous class of persons in his time whose want of liberty consisted in a deprivation of the power of locomotion (which he speaks of as the characteristic of a freeman), except at the will of Lords of Manors. A species of men, called villeins regardant, were even treated as parcel of the real estate, and Lord Coke accordingly instructs us how a widow was to be endowed out of them. The Poor, in the reign of Charles II., were made regardant to parishes, and compulsorily removable thereto. The Law of Settlement as well as that of Parochial Relief had been established by a Statute of Elizabeth; but, until the reign of Charles II., there was no regulation to prevent an able-bodied and industrious pauper from resorting to any parish that he pleased for employment. In the Act of the 13th and 14th Charles II. c. 12, it is recited, that, "by reason of defects in the law, poor people are not restrained from going from one parish to another, and, therefore, do endeavour to settle themselves in those parishes where there is the best stock, the largest commons or wastes to build cottages, the most woods for them to burn and destroy, and when they have consumed it, then to another parish, and at last become rogues and vagabonds;" it is then made lawful for two Justices of the Peace,

after complaint, within forty days after any persons so coming to settle in any tenement under the yearly value of ten pounds, to remove them to the parish where they were last legally settled, unless upon giving security to indemnify the parish where they are found, to be allowed by the Justices. It is to be observed, that the penalties inflicted on rogues and vagabonds were, by other statutes in force in the reign of Charles II., inhuman and merciless.

This provision led to furtive residences for forty days, and that again to the requisition of a written notice of residence. But, by a Statute of George III., a man coming to settle in a parish is no longer liable to removal upon the mere probability of his becoming chargeable; and it is required that he should have become actually chargeable by receiving or applying for relief. In 1722, the workhouse was made a test of destitution. It would appear, from the Report of the Poor Law Commissioners of 1834, that the most pressing of the existing evils connected with the public maintenance of the Poor were traceable, in a great measure, to the operation of the Act of Charles II. touching settlements and removals. An important Statute for the general administration of the Poor Laws, was, pursuant to the recommendations of the Commissioners, passed in the reign of William IV. (4th and 5th W. IV. c. 76). In the year 1846, a considerable mitigation of the system of removal was effected by a Statute of Victoria (9th and 10th Vic. c. 66), prohibiting removals of persons who have resided for five years in any parish, or becoming chargeable in respect of relief rendered necessary by such sickness or accident as shall not produce permanent disability. The total abolition of the system of removals is one of the legislative questions of the day: at all events the personal liberty of the Poor according to law may be considered to have been ameliorated since the reign of Charles II., in which reign they became more shackled and villeinized than theretofore "since the Norman Conquest."

An instructive sketch of the operation of the Statute of Charles II., for the removal of the Poor, is given by Sir Josiah Child, writing in 1665: "A poor idle woman, that will not work, or that nobody will employ in the country, comes up to London, to set up the trade of begging; such a person, probably, may beg up and down the streets seven years, it may be seven-andtwenty, before any body asketh why she doth so; and, if at length she hath the ill-hap in some parish to meet with a more vigilant beadle than one in twenty of them are, all he does is but to lead her the length of five or six houses into another parish, and then concludes, as his masters the parishioners do, that he hath done the part of a most diligent officer. But suppose he should yet go farther, to the end of his line, which is the end of the law, and the perfect execution of his office,-that is, suppose he should carry this poor wretch to a justice of the peace, who should order the delinquent to be whipt, and sent from parish to parish to the place of her birth or last abode, which not one justice of twenty, through pity or other cause, will do: even this is a great charge npon the country, and yet the business of the nation itself wholly undone; for no sooner doth the delinquent arrive at the place assigned, but, for shame or idleness, she presently deserts it, and wanders directly back, or some other way, hoping for better fortune; whilst the parish to which she is sent, knowing her a lazy, and perhaps a worse qualified person, is as willing to be rid of her as she is to be gone from thence." Sir J. Child recommends the institution of officers, to be called, "Fathers of the Poor," each of whom is to wear some honorable badge, as he suggests, "after the manner of the Familiars of the Inquisition."