Assuredly the remembrance of these celebrated English enactments, which the Americans regarded as an inherent part of the law of their land, had a substantial share in the declarations of rights after 1776. Many stipulations from Magna Charta and the English Bill of Rights were directly embodied by the Americans in their lists.
And yet a deep cleft separates the American declarations from the English enactments that have been mentioned. The historian of the American Revolution says of the Virginia declaration that it protested against all tyranny in the name of the eternal laws of man's being: "The English petition of right in 1688 was historic and retrospective; the Virginia declaration came directly out of the heart of nature and announced governing principles for all peoples in all future times."[49]
The English laws that establish the rights of subjects are collectively and individually confirmations, arising out of special conditions, or interpretations of existing law. Even Magna Charta contains no new right, as Sir Edward Coke, the great authority on English law, perceived as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century.[50] The English statutes are far removed from any purpose to recognize general rights of man, and they have neither the power nor the intention to restrict the legislative agents or to establish principles for future legislation. According to English law Parliament is omnipotent and all statutes enacted or confirmed by it are of equal value.
The American declarations, on the other hand, contain precepts which stand higher than the ordinary lawmaker. In the Union, as well as in the individual states, there are separate organs for ordinary and for constitutional legislation, and the judge watches over the observance of the constitutional limitations by the ordinary legislative power. If in his judgment a law infringes on the fundamental rights, he must forbid its enforcement. The declarations of rights even at the present day are interpreted by the Americans as practical protections of the minority.[51] This distinguishes them from the "guaranteed rights" of the European states. The American declarations are not laws of a higher kind in name only, they are the creations of a higher lawmaker. In Europe, it is true, the constitutions place formal difficulties in the way of changing their specifications, but almost everywhere it is the lawmaker himself who decides upon the change. Even in the Swiss Confederacy judicial control over the observance of these forms is nowhere to be found, although there, as in the United States, the constitutional laws proceed from other organs than those of the ordinary statutes.
The American bills of rights do not attempt merely to set forth certain principles for the state's organization, but they seek above all to draw the boundary line between state and individual. According to them the individual is not the possessor of rights through the state, but by his own nature he has inalienable and indefeasible rights. The English laws know nothing of this. They do not wish to recognize an eternal, natural right, but one inherited from their fathers, "the old, undoubted rights of the English people."
The English conception of the rights of the subject is very clear upon this point. When one looks through the Bill of Rights carefully, one finds but slight mention there of individual rights. That laws should not be suspended, that there should be no dispensation from them, that special courts should not be erected, that cruel punishments should not be inflicted, that jurors ought to be duly impanelled and returned, that taxes should not be levied without a law, nor a standing army kept without consent of Parliament, that parliamentary elections should be free, and Parliament be held frequently—all these are not rights of the individual, but duties of the government. Of the thirteen articles of the Bill of Rights only two contain stipulations that are expressed in the form of rights of the subject,[52] while one refers to freedom of speech in Parliament. When nevertheless all the stipulations of the Bill of Rights are therein designated as rights and liberties of the English people,[53] it is through the belief that restriction of the crown is at the same time right of the people.
This view grew directly out of the mediæval conception of the Teutonic state. While the ancient state appears at the beginning of its history as πολις or civitas, as an undivided community of citizens, the monarchical Teutonic state is from the beginning dualistic in form,—prince and people form no integral unity, but stand opposed to each other as independent factors. And so the state in the conception of the time is substantially a relation of contract between the two. The Roman and Canonical theory of law under the influence of ancient traditions even as early as the eleventh century attempts to unite the two elements in that, upon the basis of a contract, it either makes the people part with their rights to the prince, and accordingly makes the government the state, or it considers the prince simply as the authorized agent of the people and so makes the latter and the state identical. The prevailing opinion in public law, however, especially since the rise of the state of estates, sees in the state a double condition of contract between prince and people. The laws form the content of this compact. They established, therefore, for the prince a right of demanding lawful obedience, and for the people of demanding adherence to the limitations placed by the laws. The people accordingly have a right to the fulfilment of the law by the prince. Thus all laws create personal rights of the people, and the term people is thought of in a confused way as referring to the individuals as well as to the whole—singuli et universi.[54] From this point of view it is a right of the people that Parliament should be frequently summoned, that the judge should inflict no cruel punishments, and however else the declarations of the English charters may read.
This conception of law as two-sided, establishing rights for both elements of the state, runs through all the earlier English history. The right which is conferred by law passes from generation to generation, it becomes hereditary and therefore acquirable by birth as one of the people. Under Henry VI. it is declared of the law: "La ley est le plus haute inheritance que le roy ad; car par la ley il même et toutes ses sujets sont rulés, et si la ley ne fuit, nul roy et nul inheritance sera."[55] And in the Petition of Right Parliament makes the appeal that the subjects have inherited their freedom through the laws.[56] The laws, as the Act of Settlement expresses it, are the "birthright of the people".[57]
And so we find only ancient "rights and liberties" mentioned in the English laws of the seventeenth century. Parliament is always demanding simply the confirmation of the "laws and statutes of this realm", that is, the strengthening of the existing relations between king and people. Of the creation of new rights there is not a word in all these documents. Consequently there is no reference whatever to the important fundamental rights of religious liberty, of assembling, of liberty of the press, or of free movement. And down to the present day the theory of English law does not recognize rights of this kind, but considers these lines of individual liberty as protected by the general principle of law, that any restraint of the person can only come about through legal authorization.[58] According to the present English idea the rights of liberty rest simply upon the supremacy of the law,—they are law, not personal rights.[59] The theory, founded in Germany by Gerber, and defended by Laband and others, according to which the rights of liberty are nothing but duties of the government, sprang up in England, without any connection with the German teaching, from the existing conditions after the conception of the public rights of the individual as natural rights, which was based on Locke and Blackstone, had lost its power.
But with Locke even this conception stands in close connection with the old English ideas. When Locke considers property—in which are included life and liberty—as an original right of the individual existing previous to the state, and when he conceives of the state as a society founded to protect this right, which is thus transformed from a natural to a civil right, he by no means ascribes definite fundamental rights to the man living in the state, but rather places such positive restrictions upon the legislative power as follow from the purposes of the state.[60] When closely examined, however, these restrictions are nothing else than the most important stipulations of the Bill of Rights, which was enacted the year before the Two Treatises on Government appeared.[61]