The Quebec Act of 1774the Magna Charta of the French-Canadian racefinally passed the House of Lords on the 18th of June.

It was to be the Maxima Charta of mankind securing to the nations their rights and liberties and uniting them for the preservation of universal peace.

It was at Northampton that he gave them their first training in political actiona training whose full results were seen half a century later in the winning of Magna Charta.

He rose early in the morning, ante diem poscens chartas, and was constant on horseback at his usual hour, and in all seasons.

"Obey orders, though you break owners," is the Magna Charta of the main.

They refused to interfere; and he was arraigned[a] at the sessions, where, instead of pleading, he kept his prosecutors at bay during five successive days, appealing to Magna Charta and the rights of Englishmen, producing exceptions against the indictment, and demanding his oyer, or the specification of the act for his banishment, of the judgment on which the act was founded, and of the charge which led to that judgment.

At si virgo tuas dignabitur inclyta chartas Tangere, sive schedis haereat illa tuis: Da modo te facilem, et quaedam folia esse memento Conveniant oculis quae magis apta suis.

Si quis Causidicus chartas impingat in istas, Nil mihi vobiscum, pessima turba vale; Sit nisi vir bonus, et juris sine fraude peritus, Tum legat, et forsan doctior inde siet.

But the Chief-justice refused the applications, and upheld the verdict, on the ground that the juries, in their assessment of damages, had been "influenced by a righteous indignation at the conduct of those who sought to exercise arbitrary power over all the King's subjects, to violate Magna Charta, and to destroy the liberty of the kingdom, by insisting on the legality of this general warrant.

The fact that Shakespeare could write a play about King John, and say nothing about Runnymede and Magna Charta, shows that that incident in constitutional history had not yet passed into popular legend.

The end of the poem bidsthough more reluctantlyfarewell to the muses also: Ite hinc Camenae; vos quoque ite jam sane dulces Camenae (nam fatebimur verum, dulces fuistis): et tamen meas chartas revisitote, sed pudenter et raro.

We may then interpret line thirteen of the ninth Catalepton: pauca tua in nostras venerunt carmina chartas, as a statement that in the autumn of 42, Vergil had already written some of his Eclogues, and that these early onespresumably at least numbers II, III, and VIIcontain suggestions from Messalla.

There were would-be despots in England after the granting of Magna Charta; but it outlived them all, and the liberties of the English people are secure.

" Slaveholders, and the apologists of slavery, have eagerly seized upon this little passage of Scripture, and held it up as the masters' Magna Charta, by which they were licensed by God himself to commit the greatest outrages upon the defenceless victims of their oppression.

Magna Charta; 6.

"Magna Charta merely fashionable fad of ye Barons.

Vincent Starrett (A); 26Mar70; R485358. Three great documents of human liberties: Magna Charta, Declaration of Independence, Constitution of the United States.

Magna Charta, granted by King John, while redressing many hardships and grievances incident to feudal times, and confirming and securing to the people many rights and liberties, among which was the right of the wife to dower in her husband's property, denied to women the right of appeal except in case of the death of their husbands.

But one would not meet many English at a lunch in a London club who took the contract for building London Wall or helped bully King John into signing Magna Charta.

It, perhaps, fills the same position in the history of ethics that the English Constitution does in political history; yet it has had nothing to compare with the Magna Charta or the Habeas Corpus Act.

Some writers have doubted whether this writ existed as a practical remedy much before the Statute of Charles II; but here it says that parties indicted, etc., are to have the writ de odio et atia "lest they be kept long in prison, like as it is declared in Magna Charta."

It is expressly guaranteed in our Federal Constitution, as for the matter of that it was also in Magna Charta, as clearly as the right to liberty, and usually in the very same clause.

It is an American constitutional principle; and this principle also provides, as does Magna Charta and the early charters of England as to personal property seized by royal purveyors, that full damages must be paid; and to this general principle our constitutions have added that the damages must be paid at the time of the taking and the amount be determined by due process of law; that is to say, in most cases by a jury.

'Liberty pursued': Runimede, where Magna Charta was first sealed.

MAGNA CHARTA, "the great charter," extorted from King John by the barons of England at Runnymede on June 5, 1215, that guaranteed certain rights and privileges to the subjects of the realm, which were pronounced inviolable, and that established the supremacy of the law over the will of the monarch.