A
NEW WORLD CASE FOR PRESERVING THE' RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES OF ENGLISHMEN'
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PART I
[The following extracts are from :
The Influence Of Magna Carta on
American Development
by H.D. Hazeltine, M.A., Litt.D
[1917]
-because of the extensive research
developed in this subject we will be only selecting some of the
available material to emphasis what we have already lost and why we must
fight to regain the treasonable handovers by our politicians over the
past 35 years of:
'The Rights and Liberties Of
Englishmen.']
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THE INFLUENCE OF MAGNA CARTA ON
AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT
For seven centuries Magna Carta has
exerted a powerful influence upon the constitutional and legal
development. During the first four centuries after 1215 this influence
was confined to ENGLAND and the British Isles.
With the growth of the British Empire
during the last three hundred years, the principles of the Charter have
spread to many of the political communities which have derived their
constitutional and legal systems from ENGLAND, and which have owed in
the past, or which still owe, allegiance to the mother-country.
The earliest, and perhaps the most
important phrase of this imperial history of Magna Carta is its effect
upon the constitutions and laws of the American colonies and of the
Federal Union [of the United States of America] that was established
after the War of Independence.
[In 2007 every Englishman must be aware
that we are ourselves in a battle in our own
WAR of INDEPENDENCE
-the first shots have yet to be fired
to reclaim of inherited rights and liberties should it be
the only way forward to reclaim that which has been by stealth and
treacherous and illegal means has been taken from us. As in the Great
Rebellion the Cause will divide families and brothers and sisters but
the result will be Victory for our Cause because we have Right and
Legitimacy on our side.]
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In this story of the Charter's
influence upon American constitutional development three separate
periods should be distinguished. The colonial period, which began with
the granting of the first Virginia Charter by James 1 in 1606 and ended
about 1760, was followed by the epoch of the American revolution.
With the Treaty of Paris of 1783, in
which Great Britain acknowledged her former colonies to be
"free, sovereign, and independent
States,"
-the present period of national
existence had its definite beginnings.
[As in 2007 all loyal citizens of our
ancient constitution are fighting to defend the same ideals which were
given to our colonies those hundreds of years ago. It is the mother-of
parliaments appealing to her children to come to her aid to defend those
rights and liberties which have been treasured for almost 800 years.]
Each one of these periods is closely
related to earlier events and ideas in the history of ENGLAND and of the
Colonies. Together the three periods constitute American constitutional
and legal evolution is one that rests for its FOUNDATION upon the long
centuries of ENGLISH development that preceded its own beginnings,
and that bears also, in a marked degree, the imprint of the
constitutional and legal changes in ENGLAND during the period of
colonization and even in later times.
Indeed, rightly to understand the
constitutional and legal history of the colonies and of the United
States of America, in each period of which magna Carta plays a role, we
should not forget that the Englishmen who settled in America in the
seventeenth century inherited all the preceding ages of ENGLISH history.
To them belonged Magna Carta and the
Common Law; to them belonged the legal traditions of the Tudor age
- the age that immediately preceded the period of colonization.
The colonies did not fail to enter upon their inheritance; and the
result has been that colonial institutions and principles, both of
public and of private law, retained much of the Tudor and pre-Tudor
tradition, and that even today [1917] American institutions and
principles bear the impress of its influence today in 2007.]
For ENGLAND the seventeenth century was
the first great age of the Empire - the age of commercial and colonial
expansion not only in the West, but in the East; and it was the age also
of the momentous struggle at home between the CROWN and PARLIAMENT -
between the claims of the royal prerogative and of parliamentary
supremacy.
[In 2007 the CROWN and PARLIAMENT has
deceived the PEOPLE by the gradual process of handing over our
'accustomed rights and liberties' under the smokescreen of an
illegal war and its consequent backlash of resentment from the Muslim
world and a great majority of the people in our once respected and
law-abiding democratic country.]
In America the seventeenth century was
pre-eminently the age of settlement and the growth of chartered conies,
either of proprietary or corporate character, this American development
constituting one phrase of ENGLISH expansion; and it was likewise the
age in which results of constitutional conflict in ENGLAND exerted their
first influences upon the development of colonial institutions and of
colonial legal and political ideas.
The growth of the colonies in America
meant, from the very beginning, the extension of ENGLISH institutions
and laws to these little ENGLAND'S across the sea. To their
birth-right of the ENGLISH traditions of the sixteenth and earlier
centuries was now added the gift of the constitutional and legal
principles established in seventeenth-century ENGLAND, the ENGLAND of
Stuart kings, of Commonwealth and Protectorate, of REVOLUTION; for
changes in the public and private law of ENGLAND during the century
directly and vitally affected constitutional and legal growth in the
colonies.
As the Common Law heritage of
ENGLISHMEN in the colonies. Thus , Like Magna Carta itself, the great
constitutional documents of the seventeenth century, such as the
PETITION OF RIGHT
HABEAS CORPUS ACT
-and the
BILL OF RIGHTS
-have a colonial as well as a purely
ENGLISH history. To these STATUTES, as to Magna Carta, the colonists
turned as the documentary evidence of the
FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES OF ALL
ENGLISHMEN
-whether they resided in the home-land
or in the ENGLISH communities of America.
[How can Englishmen of the 21st century
stand by and see that great inheritance which has proved its sacred
nature in America and in many new nations in the world to be sacrificed
by our Government in order to join a system which destroys the very
sacred inheritance developed and defended with much blood over the
centuries be cast aside by a 21st century King John and even worse
supported by that very ancient institution our House of Commons the very
institution which was developed to protect our inherited rights and
liberties. We cannot allow this to happen and with the world
looking on - we cannot let it happen.]
.... From the early eighteenth century
down to the present day American institutions have developed, in the
main, along their own lines, largely upon the basis of English
development in the seventeenth century and earlier centuries, colonial
development in the seventeenth century, and American political thought
and constructive statesmanship of the eighteenth , nineteenth , and
twentieth centuries.
This striking divergence of American from English
institutions, dating from the early eighteenth century, is in sharp
contrast with the history of law. Through out the eighteenth century,
though perhaps less in the period of the Revolution, English Common Law
continued to influence the development of colonial legislation and
judicial decisions; and even today the American system of Common Law and
Equity is in its fundamental characteristics the same as that of
England.
So, too, in certain leading features of constitutional
law - as distinct from constitutional institutions, such as the
American system of three co-ordinate departments of government and the
power of the judicature to declare an Act of the legislature null and
void because in conflict with the written constitution -we see a
striking persistence of English principles.
[Unfortunately the omission of a written
constitution in Britain has made the progress of its absorption into a
United States of Europe that much easier for its politicians over
the last 35 years. Our safety depended on our representatives honouring
the 'Checks and Balances' or Conventions of the Realm which they soon
realised were easy to assail and demolish with their task over 35 years
almost complete before the people had realised what was afoot.
Fortunately at the eleventh hour which appears an English characteristic
it has now begun to awake from its slumber and realising just in time
that there was indeed a threat to their Customs (Values) Constitution and
Country.]
Rights and Liberties of Englishmen embodied in Magna
Carta, the Bill of Rights, and other constitutional documents became
vital features of colonial constitutional law, and have continued
throughout the revolutionary and national epochs to the present day to
be essential elements of American constitutional law.
The story of the influence of Magna Carta on American
constitutional development is but one phase of the whole history of
English institutions and law in America, and this in turn is but one
chapter in the history of a broader, a further-reaching development -the
extension of English institutions and of English Common and Statutory
Law to the many communities that have formed or still form parts of the
British Empire [1917]
In studying Magna Carta in America we are concerned,
therefore, with one feature and one only, of this whole vast process.
But just as the influence of Magna Carta in England itself cannot be
understood apart from the long history of the ever changing body of rules
and principles that go to make up the system of English Common Law, of
which the provisions of Magna Carta form only a part, so, too an
understanding of the influence of Magna Carta in America can only be
reached by considering this great legal document as but one of the many
sources of English Common Law in its American environment. In the
present paper certain main features of the American development,
throughout its three period, will be suggested; but without any attempt
at exhaustive consideration.
I. From the very beginning the colonists claimed
they were entitled as Englishmen to the law of Englishmen - the Common
Law as a great corpus juris based on the decisions of the courts
and on the statutory enactments of Parliament, in a body of rules of
private and public law which secured to Englishmen their rights as
private individuals in their relations one with another and also their
rights and liberties as subjects of the Crown.
It was the Common Law of England which
the various colonies, acting through their executive, legislature, and
judicature, adopted or received, either partially or wholly, as the law
adapted to the needs of English communities in America.
Along with the English Law thus received by the
colonists, there grew up in various American communities new rules and
principles based on colonial customs, the reformative skill of
colonial law-makers, and in the Puritan colonies of NEW ENGLAND
-natural or Divine law.
[In
claiming the Common law as their own the colonists were but applying
Lord Chief Justice of England -
Edward Coke's (Cook's) doctrine (12 Rep.39) (1603) that
"the law and custom of England is the inheritance of the
subject"
That Lord Phillips, our present Lord Chief
Justice of England, is what the millions of loyal subjects to the
true constitution of England intend to defend in the year 2007 as our
forebears in the past .
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TO BE CONTINUED in
PART 2
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[Font Altered-Bolding &Underlining Used
-Comments in Brackets]
FEBRUARY/07
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Brought Forward from 2007
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