Alabaster Blue Sectory 18
Page 07

Thus Rome was a city supported, in a great measure, by the fruits of its conquests, that is, in a certain sense, by plunder. It was a vast community most efficiently and admirably organized for this purpose; and yet it would not be perfectly just to designate the people simply as a band of robbers. They rendered, in some sense, an equivalent for what they took, in establishing and enforcing a certain organization of society throughout the world, and in preserving a sort of public order and peace. They built cities, they constructed aqueducts and roads; they formed harbors, and protected them by piers and by castles; they protected commerce, and cultivated the arts, and encouraged literature, and enforced a general quiet and peace among mankind, allowing of no violence or war except what they themselves created. Thus they _governed_ the world, and they felt, as all governors of mankind always do, fully entitled to supply themselves with the comforts and conveniences of life, in consideration of the service which they thus rendered.

Now there is a hard and bitter fact of life, very different from the story of the fenland. I am not going to argue about it or discuss it, because to trace the threads of it back into life entangles one at once helplessly in a dreadful series of problems: namely, how it comes to pass that a calamity, grievous and intolerable beyond all calamities in its pain and sorrow and waste, a strife abhorred and dreaded by all who are concerned in it, fruitful in every shade of misery and wretchedness, should yet have come about so inevitably and relentlessly. No one claims to have desired war; all alike plead that it is in self-defence that they are fighting, and maintain that they have laboured incessantly for peace. Yet the great mills of fate are turning, and grinding out death and shame and loss. Everyone sickens for peace, and yet any proposal of peace is drowned in cries of bitterness and rage. The wisest spend their time in pointing out the blessings which the conflict brings. The mother hears that the son she parted with in strength and courage is mouldering in an unknown grave, and chokes her tears down. The fruit of years of labour is consumed, lands are laid desolate, the weak and innocent are wronged; yet the great war-engine goes thundering and smashing on, leaving hatred and horror behind it; and all the while men pray to a God of mercy and loving-kindness and entreat His blessing on the work they are doing.

In the history of constitutional liberty, of which the Great Charter is the beginning, its specific provisions are of far less importance than its underlying principle. What we to-day consider the great safeguards of Anglo-Saxon liberty are all conspicuously absent from the first of its creative statutes, nor could any of them have been explained in the meaning we give them to the understanding of the men who framed the charter. Consent to taxation in the modern sense is not there; neither taxation nor consent. Trial by jury is not there in that form of it which became a check on arbitrary power, nor is it referred to at all in the clause which has been said to embody it. Parliament, habeas corpus, bail, the independence of the judiciary, are all of later growth, or existed only in rudimentary form. Nor can the charter be properly called a contract between king and nation. The idea of the nation, as we now hold it, was still in the future, to be called into existence by the circumstances of the next reign. The idea of contract certainly pervades the document, but only as the expression of the always existent contract between the suzerain and his vassals which was the foundation of all feudal law. On the other hand, some of the provisions of our civil liberty, mainly in the interest of individual rights, are plainly present. That private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation, that cruel and unusual punishments shall not be inflicted nor excessive fines be imposed, that justice shall be free and fair to all, these may be found almost in modern form.

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