ments.

As civilization, knowledge, and power increased among the people, the jurisdiction of the lords of the council became more odious and intolerable. Unfortunately, too, the court of Star Chamber, which at one time appears to have been serviceable in the manner described by Sir Thomas Smith, “ as bridling such stout noblemen or gentlemen which would offer wrong by force to any manner of men, and could not be content to demand or defend the right by order of law, degenerated in the reigns of James I. and Charles I. into a mere engine of state, and was employed as one of the main instruments for the assertion of prerogative, pretension, and the enforcement of illegal taxation. "They extended their jurisdiction," says Clarendon, "from riots, perjury, and the most notorious misdemeanors to the asserting of all proclamations and orders of state; to the vindicating of illegal commissions and grants of monopolies; holding for honorable that which pleased, and for just that which profited; and becoming both a court of law o determine civil rights, and a court of revenue to enrich the treasury; the council table by proclamation enjoining to the people that which was not enjoined by the laws, and prohibiting that which was not prohibited; and the Star Chamber, which consisted of the same persons in different rooms, censuring the breach and disobedience to these proclamations by very great fines, imprisonments, and corporal severities; so that any disrespect to any acts of state, or to the persons of statesmen, were in no time more penal, and the foundations of right never more in danger to be destroyed."

Let the patriotic American of this day carefully read this description by Lord Clarendon of the usurped prerogatives of the Star Chamber court of England, weighing calmly each expression as he comes thereto let him then think of the condition of his country at the present moment, and the more than kingly prerogatives usurped by our court of star chamber, the President and cabinet, in presidential "proclamations and orders of state," which have "enjoined upon the people that which is not enjoined by the laws, and prohibited that which by the laws is not prohibited;" in illegal" commissions" issued to so-called military governors of sovereign States and a multitude of unnecessary officers whose functions have no legal sanction or authority-in grants of cotton.

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"monopolies" so freely issued from the Treasury Department to the partisans of the Administration—in the holding for "loyal " of that which pleases a mere faction of the people, and for "just" of a dishonest legal-tender paper currency, which is the reverse of fitable "in the erection of the President or any member of his cabinet into a sufficient "court of law to determine civil rights," and thereupon to trample on them-in the empowering of major-generals and others to assume that they may hold courts both of law and "revenue," in which they confiscate estates and money which do not "enrich the treasury "—and in the punishment of disobedience to these proclamations and other usurpations "by very great fines" unlawfully assessed, by arbitrary "imprisonments" in forts and arsenals of the United States, and "by corporal severities" at the Dry Tortugas and elsewhere-let him, we say, thus read, thus meditate, and then declare to his own conscience whether he believes "that any disrespect to acts of state" has ever been "more penal" than it has been in these States for three years past, and whether "the foundations of right were ever "in more danger to be destroyed " than they are now, to-day. These questions must ere long be effectually answered, or we and our posterity must reap a bitter harvest from the seeds of tyranny we madly suffer a corrupt Administration to sow over every one of our most ancient and most cherished rights and institutions.

For the present we must leave the High Court of Star Chamber. We shall have more to say of it when we come to the unhappy reign of Charles I.

III. During this period (from Edward I. to James I.) English history supplies us with a pregnant illustration of the wisdom of our English ancestors and our own stupendous folly. The institution of slavery, in attempting to destroy which, we have perhaps destroyed a nation, is no novelty in history. It is the creature of peculiar circumstances always, and always disappears with the peculiar circumstances which have brought it into being. Slavery among the Jews, in Greece, in Rome, in the Germanic kingdoms into which the Empire was divided, and in England, thus rose and thus passed away; and the same system in America, had it been left to run its natural course, would, in the providence of God,

have found its own solution in the influence of natural causes. During the period of English history with which we are at present concerned, the problem of Saxon slavery was solved; and we have thought that Hallam's outline of the steps by which this end was reached might not improperly be introduced here to show how slavery was done away in England, not by legislation or coercion, and still less by arbitrary royal proclamation, but by a simple change in the original circumstances of the masters and their slaves; in order to show further that in any country the same institution may be naturally expected to arrive at a like end when it has ceased to be of service in the commonwealth. We have preferred to give the version of Hallam verbatim, lest it might be thought that we had in any way distorted or concealed facts, from a desire to give them a peculiar coloring; and therefore, before giving his account, we venture to present the following points to the attention of the reader to be borne in mind during his perusal of it: 1. The Saxon churl was as absolute a slave to the Norman as the Southern negro to his master.

2. The right of the Norman master to the labor of his villain was a prescriptive and unquestioned right, in no respect differing from that of the American slaveholder.

3. The abolition of Saxon slavery was not effected by legislation, coercion, or proclamation, but was gradual, natural, and for the most part voluntary on the master's part.

4. Had coercive emancipation been attempted by any power in the state to the prejudice of the prescriptive rights of masters, it cannot be doubted that the Normans would have offered as determined a resistance to it as they did to every other invasion of their rights. Nor can it well be doubted that an attempt at forced emancipation, by arousing opposition to it in the Norman masters, would have indefinitely delayed the emancipation of the churls.

5. If it be said that Southern slavery is governed by the strict rules of the Roman slave code, and not by the rules of English common law, our answer is: That under Roman law, slavery disappeared as effectually as under English law; that slavery in any country must have some peculiar characteristics which do not exist in any other country; that history shows that, soon or late,

the growth of population or some other cause leads to a gradual and natural emancipation, independently of law; and therefore that a knowledge of the progress of emancipation in the peculiar case of England is peculiarly valuable in any other case where plans and systems of emancipation are considered. Judging from all past experience—and not least from the experience of England— we believe that the best plan is to have no plan, and that the only certain system is that which is naturally evolved by circumstances in each several case. Interference only retards the progress of emancipation. With these remarks we now proceed with Hallam.

In a former passage I have remarked of the Anglo-Saxon churls, that neither their situation nor that of their descendants for the earlier reigns after the conquest appears to have been mere servitude. But from the time of Henry II., as we learn from Glanvil, the villain so called was absolutely dependent upon his lord's will, compelled to unlimited services, and destitute of property, not only in the land he held for his maintenance, but in his own acquisitions. If a villain purchased or inherited land, the lord might seize it; if he accumulated stock, its possession was equally precarious. Against his lord he had no right of action, because his indemnity in damages, if he could have recovered any, might have been immediately taken away. If he fled from his lord's service, or from the land which he held, a writ issued de nativitate probanda, and the master recovered his fugitive by law. His children were born to the same state of servitude; and contrary to the rule of the civil law, where one parent was free and the other in villainage, the offspring followed the father's condition.

This class was distinguished into villains regardant, who had been attached from time immemorial to a certain manor, and villains in gross, where such territorial prescription had never existed, or had been broken. In the condition of these, whatever has been said by some writers, I can find no manner of difference; the distinction was merely technical, and affected only the mode of pleading. The term, in gross, is appropriated in our legal language to property held absolutely and without reference to any other. Thus it is applied to rights of advowson or of common, when possessed simply, and not as incident to any particular lands. And there can

be no doubt that it was used in the same sense for the possession of a villain. But there was a class of persons, sometimes inaccurately confounded with villains, whom it is more important to separate; villainage had a double sense, as it related to persons or to lands. As all men were free or villains, so all lands were held by a free or villain tenure. As a villain might be enfeoffed of freeholds, though they lay at the mercy of his lord, so a freeman might hold tenements in villainage. In this case his personal liberty subsisted along with the burdens of territorial servitude. He was bound to arbitrary service at the will of the lord, and he might, by the same will, be at any moment dispossessed, for such was the condition of his tenure. But his chattels were secure from seizure, his person from injury, and he might leave the land whenever he pleased.

From so disadvantageous a condition as this of villainage, it may cause some surprise that the peasantry of England should have ever emerged. The law incapacitating a villain from acquiring property, placed, one would imagine, an insurmountable barrier in the way of his enfranchisement. It followed from thence, and is positively said by Glanvil, that a villain could not buy his freedom, because the price he tendered would already belong to his lord; and even in the case of free tenants in villainage, it is not easy to comprehend how their uncertain and unbounded services could ever pass into slight pecuniary commutations, much less how they could come to maintain themselves in their lands, and mock the lord with a nominal tenure according to the custom of the manor.

This, like many others relating to the progress of society, is a very obscure inquiry. We can trace the pedigree of princes, fill up the catalogue of towns besieged and provinces desolated, describe even the whole pageantry of coronations and festivals, but we cannot recover the genuine history of mankind. It has passed away with slight and partial notice by contemporary writers, and our most patient industry can hardly at present put together enough of the fragments to suggest a tolerably clear representation of ancient manners and social life. I cannot profess to undertake what would require a command of books as well as leisure beyond my reach;