Magna Carta, and Other Addresses

by William D. Guthrie

To the student of American institutions it must appear singularly impressive and instructive that the members of the Constitutional Convention of the state of New York have paused in their important work to celebrate the seven-hundredth anniversary of the Great Charter of English Liberties and to look back reverently through the centuries to the sources of our constitutional law and to the days when our ancestors were laying the foundations of civil liberty and political justice. It is, indeed, no exaggeration to assert that Magna Carta marked the greatest political epoch in the history of our race, in that it saved England from becoming one of the arbitrary and degrading despotisms which arose in Europe after the overthrow of the feudal system, and that from its principles sprang representative and constitutional government, with all that these terms have grown to mean to Americans. This ceremony must again emphasize the great truth that everything which has power to win the obedience and respect of men must have its roots deep in the past, and that the more slowly institutions have grown, so much the more enduring are they likely to prove.

Two hundred and eighteen years ago the royal governor of New York is reported to have exclaimed to the legislature of the colony: "There are none of you but are big with the privileges of Magna Carta." And to-day, Mr. President, can it not be said with equal force and pride that there are no Americans but are big with the privileges of Magna Carta? Long may that continue to be true! To provide that the spirit of these privileges shall endure forever, so far as lies in human power, is the highest and noblest duty of every American constitutional convention.

Other speakers will treat of the historical and political aspects of Magna Carta and of its reissues and confirmations by king after king and parliament after parliament. I am to speak of the legal value of some of the cardinal features of the Great Charter as antecedents of principles which are closely connected with our present political life and which continue to invigorate our system of constitutional law. But my treatment of this large and important aspect of the subject must necessarily be inadequate, in view of the limited time at your disposal.

It is undoubtedly true that Magna Carta contained much that was old in 1215 and much that subsequently became antiquated because inapplicable to changed conditions; yet it then crystallized and served to perpetuate the fundamental principles of the liberties of Englishmen. Solemnly confirmed no less than thirty-seven times by seven kings of England, it naturally became in the eyes of Englishmen the embodiment of their deepest and most firmly rooted rights and liberties and their great and stirring battle-cry against tyranny. The reissue of 1225 still remains on the English statute books as in full force and effect, so that, as an English historian has recently said, every act appearing on the statute rolls is in a sense an act amending Magna Carta.

The spirit of Magna Carta, as it thus survived, has for centuries inspired Englishmen and Americans, even though its letter may be dead and most of its provisions may long ago have become obsolete and their exact meaning hidden beneath the ruins of the past. Indeed, provisions of the Great Charter were frequently violated by king and parliament after 1215, and were allowed to fall into neglect for generations at a time; but it cannot be doubted that, if the principles they embodied had been observed, they would have secured permanent political liberty and constitutional government to England long before the seventeenth century, and that only disregard of those principles made possible the five centuries of tyranny and oppression recorded by English history.

It may likewise be true, as some historians of the scientific school are now contending, that the framers of the Great Charter and the representatives of the English church, baronage and people gathered on the meadows at Runnymede on the 15th day of June, 1215, had little or no grasp of the science of politics or of constitutional principles as we understand them. It is probably true that they had no very definite conception of the theory of representative government, or of the separation of governmental powers, or of those inalienable rights of the individual which our Declaration of Independence was later to proclaim, just as it is probably true that very few of them could even read the language in which the charter was written. But statesmen and lawyers, in dealing with the practical problems of constitutional government, will not minimize the value of Magna Carta, and our debt to the generation that forced it from King John, merely because the underlying principles may not have been fully grasped by its framers and its traditions may be based on legends and myths. It is enough that the charter contained the germ and the spirit of civil liberty and political justice.

It may be conceded that the framers of Magna Carta builded better than they knew, and likewise that many of the traditions as to the intent, meaning and scope of its provisions—traditions which were so potent and inspiring during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—were founded, as is now asserted, upon legends and myths. Yet, these legends and traditions, growing up and clustering around Magna Carta, served to keep alive and perpetuate its spirit. They generated the sentiment which impelled men to patriotic and heroic sacrifice in the cause of liberty; they sustained generation after generation in the recurring struggles for political justice and equality before the law; they formed and preserved a public morality which prevented violations of the principles of the Great Charter, and they were of incalculable inspiration and encouragement to Englishmen and Americans, if not to the whole world. The great traditions of Magna Carta have made its heritage peculiarly valuable and its service to humanity immortal. It is because of these traditions that Magna Carta is doubly sacred to us, as it was to our forefathers.

Many of us, however, venture to believe that the unknown author of the original Articles of the Barons or of the Great Charter itself—if it was not the learned Stephen Langton, who had been educated at the University of Paris and was familiar with Roman and canonical law and the charters of liberties which the kings of France had been granting to their subjects—knew far more of the underlying and vivifying principles of jurisprudence and politics than some of our modern critics are willing to attribute to that generation. Be this as it may, the political instinct of our race must have guided the framers to the eternal truths upon which the Great Charter of Liberties was based, even though they imperfectly comprehended these truths, or did not comprehend them at all. A single phrase like "the law of the land" in a political document is often wiser than is realized, not merely by the masses who acclaim it, but even by the leaders who write it. It may happily serve to preserve and compress into very small compass the relics of ancient wisdom, notwithstanding the fact that later generations are frequently puzzled to decipher the contents and discover the meaning. Such a phrase, as has been well said of the language of a nation, "sometimes locks up truths which were once well known, but which in the course of ages have passed out of sight and been forgotten. In other cases it holds the germs of truths, of which, though they were never plainly discerned, the genius of its framers caught a glimpse in a happy moment of divination, ... and often it would seem as though rays of truths, which were still below the intellectual horizon, had dawned upon the imagination as it was looking up to heaven."[2]

First and foremost among the cardinal principles of Magna Carta was the idea, then beginning again to germinate throughout Europe, that the individual has natural rights as against the government, and that those rights ought to be secured to him by fundamental laws which should be unalterable by king or council. No one can study the history of European politics during the great constructive thirteenth century without being impressed by the fact of the revival of this conception in men's minds, not only in England, but on the Continent, where it manifested itself in varying forms and in different connections. I say revival, because the same conviction had prevailed hundreds of years before in both Greece and Rome; but it had been lost for centuries.