"Magna Charta" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the conference a declaration prepared by the Governors of Louisiana, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Utah, and South Carolina, was unanimously adopted. This Magna Charta of the conservation movement declared "that the great natural resources supply the material basis upon which our civilization must continue to depend and upon which the perpetuity of the nation itself rests," that "this material basis is threatened with exhaustion," and that "this conservation of ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... the oldest copy extant of 'The Miners' Laws and Privileges,' regarded, as Mr. Wyrrall tells us, writing in the year 1780, "as the Magna Charta of our miners and colliers," incontrovertibly proves that it belongs to this period. It was first printed by William Cooper, at the Pelican in Little Britain, 1687, from a manuscript copy preserved in the office of the Deputy ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... names of persons who had to be identified with the assistance of numbers. Neither of the development of national life, nor of the clash of nations, did he really know anything that was not inessential and anecdotic. He could not remember the clauses of Magna Charta, but he knew eternally that it was signed at a place amusingly called Runnymede. And the one fact engraved on his memory about the battle of Waterloo was that it ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... against Church and against State, and against the Aristocracy, and Habeas Corpus, and against Physic, and against Standing Armies, and Magna Charta, and every other rascally tyranny and oppression to which we are subjected, that I will!" Here Tom gave such a thump with the pestle, that I thought he would have ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... "We are none the less Englishmen because we claim the rights of Englishmen, and, saving your presence, sir, are as loyal as those who do not. And if these principles be bad," I added to my uncle, "then should we think with shame upon the Magna Charta." ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Tacitus does, it is true, inform us of this. But it was undoubtedly Burton (Anat. Mel., p. 213) who informed Sterne of it. So, too, when Mr. Shandy goes on to remark upon death that "'Tis an inevitable chance—the first statute in Magna Charta—it is an everlasting Act of Parliament, my dear brother—all must die," the agreement of his views with those of Burton, who had himself said of death, "'Tis an inevitable chance—the first statute in Magna Charta—an everlasting Act of Parliament—all ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... frescoes by David Maclise—"The Spirit of Justice" and "The Spirit of Chivalry"—are over the strangers' gallery, as well as a half-dozen others by famous hands elsewhere. In niches between the windows and at the ends are eighteen statues of barons who signed Magna Charta. The House of Commons, 62 feet long, 45 broad, and 45 high, is much less elaborate than the House of Peers. The Speaker's chair is at the north end, and there are galleries along the sides and ends. In a gallery behind the Speaker, the reporters for the newspapers sit. ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... renewed and with increasing provocation, in 1820, in 1824, and in 1828—each stage intensifying the discontent, arising more from the injustice than the weight of the burden borne. It was not the twenty-shilling ship-money tax, but the violation of Magna Charta, which Hampden and his associates resisted. It was not the stamp duty nor the tea-tax, but the principle involved in taxation without representation, against which our colonial fathers took up arms. So the tariff act in 1828, known at the time as "the bill of abominations," ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... For argument's sake, grant that I have some Negro blood in me. You already make a mistake in making a gift of your blood to the African. Remember what your blood has done. It hammered out on fields of blood the Magna Charta; it took the head of Charles I.; it shattered the sceptre of George III.; it now circles the globe in an iron grasp. Think you not that this Anglo-Saxon blood loses its virility because of mixture with Negro blood. Ah! remember Frederick Douglass, he who as much as ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... it is the best proof of its truth. The imaginative parsimony and discipline which such a theory involves are balanced by the immense extension and certitude it gives to knowledge. It is at once an act of allegiance to nature and a Magna Charta which mind imposes on the tyrannous world, which in turn pledges itself before the assembled faculties of man not to exceed its constitutional privilege and to harbour no magic monsters in unattainable ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... inheritors of ages, choose! What owe ye to the past? The burly men who Magna Charta wrung >From tyranny entrenched would stand aghast To see the ripples from that stone they flung, They, too, had ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... is the formal grant by Duchess Mary of the "Groot Privilegie," or Great Privilege, the Magna Charta of Holland. Although this instrument was afterwards violated, and indeed abolished, it became the foundation of the republic. It was a recapitulation and recognition of ancient rights, not an acquisition of new privileges. It was a restoration, not a revolution. Its principal points deserve attention ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... After compelling his daughter to marry, not William of Austria, whom she loved, but Jagellon, Duke of Lithuania, who offered to unite his extensive and adjacent dominions with those of Poland, and to convert his own pagan subjects to Christianity, the nobles, in virtue of their Magna Charta, elected Jagellon (baptized under the name of Ladislas) to the throne of Poland, which thus became dynastically united ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... successive improvement in constitutional liberty, as fast as it was made here, was transmitted thither. The feudal baronage, and the feudal knighthood, the roots of our primitive Constitution, were early transplanted into that soil, and grew and flourished there. Magna Charta, if it did not give us originally the House of Commons, gave us at least an House of Commons of weight and consequence. But your ancestors did not churlishly sit down alone to the feast of Magna Charta. Ireland ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... called Magna Charta, by which it is provided that "no man shall be disseised of his liberties and free customs but by the judgment of his peers or the laws of the land," (meaning clearly, for some proved crime tried and adjudged,) I take to be a fundamental law. Now, although this Magna Charta, or some of the statutes establishing it, provide that that law shall be perpetual, and all statutes contrary to it shall be void, yet I cannot go so far as to deny the authority of statutes made in defiance of Magna Charta ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... INQUISITOR (bowing gracefully to the bar).—Good morning, gentlemen. You behold how carefully we fulfil the letter of Magna Charta. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... our particular case. The first to which this character ought to be applied, is the House of Commons in Great Britain. The history of this branch of the English Constitution, anterior to the date of Magna Charta, is too obscure to yield instruction. The very existence of it has been made a question among political antiquaries. The earliest records of subsequent date prove that parliaments were to SIT only every ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... 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 ...
— Legal Status Of Women In Iowa • Jennie Lansley Wilson
... death of Charles I. drew tears from her eyes; but she knew nothing whatever of the chronological arrangements of history; and the youngest girl in the school could have put her to shame with regard to the Magna Charta. It was just the same with every branch of knowledge which Nora had ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... Great Britain, the Congress of the United States, and representative governments all over the world have come from King John signing the Magna Charta. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... seldom comes to notice outside the pages of a novel. He made no effort to eulogize himself. He was absorbed in generous admiration for the other man and with enthusiasm for the glorious chance that Rockefeller seemed to have to make a new Magna Charta of brotherhood between Capital and Labour. In this he was a tremendous idealist. In many respects one was forced to regret that the world somehow did not seem quite so full of brotherly intention as Mr. King said that ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... seriously, because serious minds are exercised by deportation, and quite naturally. On December 13 nine Indians were arrested under a certain Indian Regulation of the year 1818, and they who reproach us with violating the glories of 1215 (which is Magna Charta) and the Petition of Rights, complain that 1818 is far too remote for us to be at all affected by anything that was then made law. Now what is the Regulation? I will ask you to follow me pretty closely for a minute or two. The Regulation of ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... a Map, and five Historical Engravings,—1. Rowena presenting wine to Vortigern. 2. King John signing Magna Charta. 3. Henry VII. proclaimed at the Battle of Bosworth Field. 4. Oliver Cromwell dissolving the long Parliament. 5. Coronation of Queen Victoria—the ...
— The World's Fair • Anonymous
... further development of The Hague Tribunal, of the work of the conferences and courts at The Hague. It has been well said that the first Hague Conference framed a Magna Charta for the nations; it set before us an ideal which has already to some extent been realized, and towards the full realization of which we can all steadily strive. The second Conference made further progress; the third should do yet more. Meanwhile the American Government has more than once tentatively ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... Walpole as a collector to be taken seriously. Walpole, however, collected things in a mood of fantasy as much as of connoisseurship. He did not take himself quite seriously. It was fancy, not connoisseurship, that made him hang up Magna Charta beside his bed and, opposite it, the warrant for the execution of King Charles I., on which he had written "Major Charta." Who can question the fantastic quality of the mind that wrote to Conway: "Remember, neither Lady Salisbury nor you, nor ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... representatives of the people; we brought with us the right of petition, as the necessary incident of such institutions. For when, in the whole history of our father-land, has the right of petition ever undergone debate and question? Go back to the old parliamentary rolls, coeval with Magna Charta; peruse the black-letter volumes in which the early laws and practices of the English monarchy are seen to be recorded; and so far as you find a government to exist, you find the right to petition that government existing also as an undeniable franchise and birthright of the humblest ...
— Speech of Mr. Cushing, of Massachusetts, on the Right of Petition, • Caleb Cushing
... cunning mode of angling for a place, and politics was a series of ingeniously-contrived manoeuvres in which the moving power of the machinery was the desire of sharing the spoils. Walpole's talk about Magna Charta and the execution of Charles I. could, it is plain, imply but a skin-deep republicanism. He could not be seriously displeased with a state of things of which his own position was the natural out-growth. His republicanism was about as ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Bethel, and Spencer's Musquil Unmasked; while Augustine Mathewes was accused of printing, for Sparke, William Prynne's Antithesis of the Church of England. Each party put in an answer, and of these, Michael Sparke's is the most interesting. He declared that the decree of 1586 was contrary to Magna Charta, and an infringement of the liberties of the subject, and he refused to say who, beside Mathewes, had printed Prynne's book; it afterwards turned out to be William Turner of Oxford, who confessed to printing several other unlicensed books. A short term of imprisonment appears ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... after the Conquest, there is no doubt that the peasantry were liable to be bought and sold as slaves. Even in Magna Charta, there is a prohibition that a guardian shall not 'waste the men or cattle' in the estate of the ward: there is here no consideration for the men who might be 'wasted;' it is all for the property of the ward, which is not to be injured through ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... company selects a lady to answer your questions, and the first thing you ask her is: "When was Magna Charta signed?" Probably she says that she doesn't know. Then you say, "What is the capital of Persia?" She answers Timbuctoo, or Omar Khayyam, according to how well informed she is. Then comes your last question: "What makes lightning?" She is practically ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... destruction of the German power is not the only thing in question here; no, it concerns a great part of civilized Europe in regard to the suspension of their hard-won political liberty; and England, the people of the Magna Charta, the first free Constitution, can never be a party to that. That is why we call to you, Bernard Shaw, in the name of Europe, and ask you for your voice in ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... myself in the Archaeological Gazette only last week.' And, do you know, it turned out that the Battle of Bouvines was fought in the Thirteenth Century, and had, as far as I could make out, something to do with Magna Charta." ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... perfect way, he shall serve me." He is fired with ambition, such as has brightened the beginning of many a reign which has darkened to cruelty and crime, to make his kingdom some faint image of God's, and to bring the actual Israel into conformity with its ancient Magna Charta, "Ye shall be to me a holy nation." And so, not knowing perhaps how hard a task he planned, and little dreaming of his own sore fall, he grasps the sword, resolved to use it for the terror of evil-doers, and vows, "I will early destroy ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... the Cake—a subject which, as is well known, I discovered in my researches in history. Where is "Udolpho in the Tower"? or the "Duke of Rothsay the Fourth Day after He was Deprived of his Victuals"? or "King John Signing Magna Charta"? They are gone with the red curtain, the brown tree, the storm in the background. Art is revolutionary, like everything else in these times, when Treason itself, in the form of a hoary apostate and reviewer of contemporary fiction, ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... affirmed by Magna Charta were deemed of such importance, in the thirteenth century, that the Bishops, twice a year, with tapers burning, and in their pontifical robes, pronounced, in the presence of the king and the representatives ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... They acknowledge that there is a just and impartial God, and are not altogether unacquainted with the law of Christian love and kindness. They claim for themselves the broadest freedom. Boastfully they tell us that they have received from the court of heaven the Magna Charta of human rights that was handed down through the clouds, and amid the lightnings of Sinai, and given again by the Son of God on the Mount of Beatitudes, while the glory of the Father shone around him. They tell us that from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution they have obtained ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... contract, agreement, bargain; affidation[obs3]; pact, paction[obs3]; bond, covenant, indenture; bundobast[obs3], deal. stipulation, settlement, convention; compromise, cartel. Protocol, treaty, concordat, Zollverein[Ger], Sonderbund[Ger], charter, Magna Charta[Lat], Progmatic Sanction, customs union, free trade region; General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, GATT; most favored nation status. negotiation &c. (bargaining) 794; diplomacy &c. (mediation) 724; negotiator &c. (agent) 758. ratification, completion, signature, seal, sigil[Lat], signet. V. contract, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... will permit the dearly-bought results of the Civil War to be nullified by any change in the Constitution. So long as the Fifteenth Amendment stands, the rights of colored citizens are ultimately secure. 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. There was slavery in this land after the Declaration of Independence, yet the faces of those who love liberty have ever turned to that immortal document. So will the Constitution and its principles outlive the ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... June, 1215—from Windsor to the meadow at Runnymede, where the barons lay encamped, and signed the articles laid before him, happy enough in getting some of them softened. The Great Charter came into being, truly the 'Magna Charta,' which throws not merely all earlier, but also the later charters ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... English constitution. He positively refused to lend a farthing. He was required to give his reasons. He answered, "that he could be content to lend as well as others, but feared to draw upon himself that curse in Magna Charta which should be read twice a year against those who infringe it." For this spirited answer, the Privy Council committed him close prisoner to the Gate House. After some time, he was again brought up; but he persisted in his refusal, and was sent to ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Spenser is my example for both these privileges of English verses; and Chapman has followed him in his translation of Homer. Mr. Cowley has given in to them after both; and all succeeding writers after him. I regard them now as the Magna Charta of heroic poetry; and am too much an Englishman to lose what my ancestors have gained for me. Let the French and Italians value themselves on their regularity; strength and elevation are our standard. I said before, and I repeat it, that the affected purity of the French has unsinewed their heroic ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... of Magna Charta, and Charta de Foresta, divers learned men in the laws, that I may use the words of the record, kept schools of the law in the city of London, and taught such as resorted to them the laws of the realm, taking their foundation of Magna Charta ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... the Negro on more than two hundred and fifty battle-fields, demonstrated his courage and skill, and wrung from the American nation the right to bear arms. The barons were no more successful in their struggle with King John when they obtained Magna Charta than were the American Negroes with Prejudice, when they secured the national recognition of their right and fitness to hold a place in the Standing Army of the United States. The Afro-American soldier now takes his rank with America's best, and in appearance, skill, physique, manners, conduct ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... unanswerable then. It is unanswerable now. Do not elevate the sovereignty of the States against the Constitution of the United States. It is hardly less odious than the early pretension of sovereign power against Magna Charta, according to the memorable words of Lord Coke, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... was first employed on documents A. D. 1213, although it was white wax which was used to seal the magna charta, granted to the English barons by King John, A. D. 1215. In 1445 red wax was much employed in England, but the earliest specimen of red sealing wax extant is found on a letter dated ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... canonicity was originally associated with the Torah, and was only afterwards extended to the other books, which slowly and by a gradual process acquired a certain measure of the validity given to the Torah by a single public and formal act, through which it was introduced at once as the Magna Charta of the Jewish communion (Nehemiah viii.-x.) In their case the canonical— that is, legal—character was not intrinsic, but was only subsequently acquired; there must therefore have been some interval, and there may have been a very ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... periods of their history; a democracy founded upon the privileges of the few and the exclusion of the many. Very much like the democracy of the barons of Runnymede, who, when they met together to dictate Magna Charta to King John, guarded fully their own privileges as against the king, but cared but little for the rights of the people. And so with the south—the old south. But it ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... out his nephew's eyes with a pair of curling-irons, and who is the first English Sovereign who attempted to write his own name; for the scrawl is evidently something more than his mark, which is attached to Magna Charta. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various
... sometimes while they indulged in day-dreams, for it was hard to recall such mundane matters as the capital of Mexico, or the date of Magna Charta, when their thoughts were far away in the lantern room, busy with concealed prisoners or ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... contend with here and there an arrogant vassal, here and there a high-spirited and rebellious town; in England, in this first great crisis of popular government, he found himself confronted by a united people. The fruits of the grand combination were first, the wresting of Magna Charta from King John in 1215, and secondly, the meeting of the first House of Commons in 1265. Four years of civil war were required to secure these noble results. The Barons' War, of the years 1263 to 1267, was an event of the same ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... kept his court in Lincoln a whole winter, and held another Parliament, in which he confirmed the Magna Charta of King John. {120a} ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... examination was easily and quickly passed. David translated his bit of Caesar's commentaries, answered brilliantly the questions about Alfred the Great, the Anglo-Norman kings, the Constitutions of Clarendon, Magna Charta and Mortmain, Henry the Eighth and the Reformation, the Civil War and Protectorate of Cromwell, the Bill of Rights and the Holy Alliance. He paid his fees and his "caution" money; he ate the requisite six dinners—or more, as he found them excellent and convenient—in ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... debts proved by the transaction witnesses, it would not have been a surprise to find the tender of suit persisting in those cases. But there was another reason still more imperative. The defence in debt where there was no deed was by wager of law. /2/ A section of Magna Charta was interpreted to prohibit a man's being put to his law on the plaintiff's own statement without good witness. /3/ Hence, the statute required witness—that is, the secta—in every case of debt where the plaintiff did not rely upon a writing. ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... like an exhalation, from its ruins.] From age to age, from man to man It lived; and lit, from land to land, Florence, Albion, Switzerland. [Footnote: Florence freed itself from the power of the Ghibelline nobles, and became a free republic in 1250. Albion—England: Magna Charta wrested from King John: the Commonwealth. Switzerland: the great victory of Mogarten, in 1315, led to the compact of the three cantons, thus forming the nucleus of ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... he knew the utter contempt in which Henry held the terms of the Magna Charta which he so often violated along with his kingly oath to maintain it. But what all England did not know, De Vac had gleaned from scraps of conversation dropped in the armory: that Henry was even now negotiating with ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Empire. A heavy, stubborn race, these Wirtembergers, hating their French-speaking rulers and jealously safeguarding those ancient rights and liberties accorded to them by the testament of Eberhard der Greiner in 1514. This Magna Charta of Swabia granted the people a degree of freedom which was exceedingly irksome to the Dukes of Wirtemberg. The nobles of the land who regarded themselves as too mighty to attend the petty court of ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... state were enabled to exert themselves in rooting out every error and heresy whatever, until they obtained a complete settlement according to the word of God, and our covenants established thereon; which covenants were then by several excellent acts both civil and ecclesiastic[8] made the MAGNA CHARTA of these nations, with respect to every civil and religious privilege; none being admitted unto any office or employment in church or state, without scriptural and covenant qualifications.—And then was that part of the antient prophecy further fulfilled, In the wilderness shall waters ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... State. When Congress changed the northern boundary of Illinois, it had deviated from the express provisions of the Ordinance of 1787, which had drawn the line through the southern bend of Lake Michigan. This departure from the Magna Charta of the Northwest furnished the would-be secessionists with a pretext. But an editorial in the Northwestern Gazette and Galena Advertiser, January 20, 1842, naively disclosed their real motive. Illinois was overwhelmed with debt, while Wisconsin ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... supremacy, and in defence of the authority of Rome. He declared that the Act of Parliament, which conferred on the king the title of supreme head of the Church, was opposed both to the laws of God and man, that it was in flagrant contradiction to the Magna Charta, and that the king of England could no more refuse obedience to the Holy See than a child could refuse obedience to his father. Even after his trial and condemnation another attempt was made to induce him to submit, but ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... stimulated other men to sing them. There was a moral infection of clap-trap in him. Strangers, modest enough elsewhere, started up at dinners in Coketown, and boasted, in quite a rampant way, of Bounderby. They made him out to be the Royal arms, the Union-Jack, Magna Charta, John Bull, Habeas Corpus, the Bill of Rights, An Englishman's house is his castle, Church and State, and God save the Queen, all put together. And as often (and it was very often) as an orator of this kind ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... much, and which we take so much pride in, is an English institution, not an American one, and it comes of a great ancestry. The first Fourth of July in that noble genealogy dates back seven centuries lacking eight years. That is the day of the Great Charter—the Magna Charta—which was born at Runnymede in the next to the last year of King John, and portions of the liberties secured thus by those hardy Barons from that reluctant King John are a part of our Declaration of Independence, of our Fourth of July, of our American ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... gathering at Philadelphia, resulting in that document embodying Jefferson's superb crystallization of popular opinion that 'all men are created free and equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness;' that American magna charta which swept away forever the will of kings in this land. The people became the rulers and the accident of birth carried no rank, conferred no privilege. We see the loosely joined colonies building a nation which contained these elements of greatness little dreamed of ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... that Magna Charta "converted the right of taxation into the shield of liberty," but it did nothing of the sort. The liberty existed before, and the right to be taxed was an efflorescence and instance of it, not a sub-stratum or a cause. The necessity ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... the whole country, even if that country should spread over the whole continent. It is our duty to carry English principles—I mean, sir [said Mr. Webster turning to Sir Henry Bulwer], Anglo-Saxon American principles, over the whole continent—the great principles of Magna Charta, of the English revolution, and especially of the American Revolution, and of the English language. Our children will hear Shakespeare and Milton recited on the shores of the Pacific. Nay, before that, American ideas, which are essentially and originally ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... opportunities which the Chancellor of the Exchequer neglects. So stirring a drama might have easily cleared its expenses—despite the length of the cast, the salaries of the stars, and the rent of the house—in mere advance booking. For it was a drama which (by the rights of Magna Charta) could never be repeated; a drama which ladies of fashion would have given their earrings to witness, even with the central figure not a woman. And there was a woman in it anyhow, to judge by the little that had ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... caught up Merridew, ball and all, and ran swiftly past every opponent to the goal. It did not seem fit to us that such a one as he should trouble his head about spondees and dactyls, or care to know who signed the Magna Charta. When he said in open class that King Alfred was the man, we little boys all felt that very likely it was so, and that perhaps Jim knew more about it than the man who ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... fruitful and multiply." Even the Russian ladies wash only to suit the dresses they wear—high-necked or decollete. The average Slav is as stupidly ignorant as any Agency Indian. He respects no law but that of blind force. His Magna Charta is the dynamite bomb. He is courageous with the bravery of the brute, which has no conception of life's sacredness. Doubtless the rule of the bayonet is the only government possible for such a barbarous people—and the Romanoffs have not ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... me from walking, and you deprive me of my health. Prevent me from going alone where I please and when I please, and you deprive me of my liberty—tear up Magna Charta, in effect. But I do not insist upon being alone in this instance. If you can return to your office by way of Regent's Park and Gower Street without losing too much time, I shall be glad of ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... the rest are so, too; but such as will not be able to do this business as it ought to be, to do any good with. Here I did also see their votes against my Lord Chiefe Justice Keeling, that his proceedings were illegal, and that he was a contemner of Magna Charta (the great preserver of our lives, freedoms, and properties) and an introduction to arbitrary government; which is very high language, and of the same sound with that in the year 1640. I home, and there wrote my letters, and ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... it is often called by way of pre-eminence, is the magna charta of the liberties of the Gallican Church. Founded upon the results of the discussions of the Council of Basle, it probably embodies all the reformatory measures which the hierarchy of France was desirous of effecting ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... selfish tyranny could but be won, the millennium would be at hand. Our heroes have been those who fought against despots for the rights of the people; we measure progress by such milestones as the Magna Charta, the French Revolution, the American Declaration of Independence. To this day we engrave the word "liberty" on our coins; and the converging multitudes from Europe look up eagerly to the great statue that welcomes them in New York Harbor and symbolizes for them the freedom that they ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... contest, with many vicissitudes, the Barons entered London and the King fled into Hampshire. By agreement both parties met at Runnymede on the 9th of June, 1215, and after several days' debate, on June 15, Magna Charta (the Great Charter), the glory of England, was signed and sealed by the sovereign. The Magna Charta is a comprehensive bill of rights, and, though crude in form, and with many clauses of merely local value, its spirit still lives and will live. Clear and prominent ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... in the darkest times excommunicated the breakers of Magna Charta do now by themselves, and their adherents, both write, preach, plot, and act against it, by encouraging Dr. Beale, by preferring Dr. Mainwaring, appearing forward for monopolies and ship- money, and if any were slow ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... week these paragraphs made their bow to the public. Mannerly admonitions, courteous disapprovals. A style borrowed from the memory of the professor informing a backward class in economics what the exact date of the signing of the Magna Charta really was. ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... Boy and his Friends. Edited by Henry Randall Waite. Old Ocean. By Ernest Ingersoll. Door Yard Folks. Amanda B. Harris. Magna Charta Stories. Arthur Gilman and others. Great Composers. Hezekiah Butterworth. The Travelling Law School. Benjamin Vaughan Abbott Pleasant Authors. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... went home, she gave her family the story of the Magna Charta, drawing such a vivid picture of King John's general depravity that even ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... some years ago under the hospitable roof of Lord Houghton. Lord Ashbourne was then Mr. Gibson, Q.C. He is now the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and the author of the Land Purchase Act of 1885, which many well-informed and sensible men regard as the Magna Charta of peace in Ireland, while others of equal authority assure me that by reversing the principle of the Bright clauses in the Act of 1871 it has encouraged the tenants to expect an eventual concession of the land-ownership to ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... art not thou too perhaps by this time made aware that all Symbols are properly Clothes; that all Forms whereby Spirit manifests itself to sense, whether outwardly or in the imagination, are Clothes; and thus not only the parchment Magna Charta, which a Tailor was nigh cutting into measures, but the Pomp and Authority of Law, the sacredness of Majesty, and all inferior Worships (Worthships) are properly a Vesture and Raiment; and the Thirty-nine ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Church and State, when individuals were claiming the right to freedom of conscience in their form of worship and the people were growing more insistent for the recognition of their ancient rights and liberties, secured to them, in the first place, by the Magna Charta,—just at this time looms up the obstruction of a King so imbued with the defunct ideal of the divine right of Kings that he is blind to the tendencies of the age. What wonder, then, if the swirling waters of discontent ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... governments of the old world? Is it because the white man is the created viceregent of government? The Scriptures affirm that all are sprung from one parental stem. Is it because he is the constitutionally invested oligarch of government? The magna charta of our liberties affirms that "all men are created equal." Is it because the law of the land reserves unto him the dominance of power? The preamble of the Federal Constitution declares that "We" and not "I," constitute "the people of the United States." ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... twenty-seven joining in this breach of the peace, my clients are entitled to an acquittal." On Lord Eldon enquiring whether he relied on common-law or statute-law, the counsel for the defence answered firmly, "My lord, I rely on a well-known maxim, as old as Magna Charta, Nine Tailors make a Man." Finding themselves unable to reward a lawyer for so excellent a jest with an adverse verdict, the jury acquitted the prisoners. Towards the close of his career Eldon made a still better jest than ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... the stained glass windows representing the Kings and Queens of the United Kingdom from the accession of William the Conqueror down to the present reign, the niches filled with effigies of the Barons who wrested Magna Charta from King John, the ceiling glowing with gold and colors presenting different national symbols and devices in most elaborate workmanship and admirable intricacy of design, it is undeniably worthy of the high purpose to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... The date of Magna Charta or The doings of the Dutch, Or capes, or towns, or verbs, or nouns Do not excite me much; But when you mention motor rides— Down by the sea for choice Or chasing games, or chocolates, I love ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... to England from the pine-woods and bright order and regimen and foreign novelty of their Bohemian Kur-Ort, in a state of renewed perplexity. Already that undocumented Magna Charta was manifestly not working upon the lines she had anticipated. The glosses Sir Isaac put upon it were extensive and remarkable and invariably in the direction of restricting her liberties and resuming ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... was instantly opened by the Lord Chancellor (Erskine), who was accompanied by the Lords Holland and Auckland; and as the clock struck twelve, just when the sun was in its meridian splendour to witness this august Act, this establishment of a Magna Charta for Africa in Britain, and to sanction it by its most vivid and glorious beams, it was completed. The ceremony being over, the seals of the respective offices were delivered up; so that the execution of this commission was the last act ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... religion by, And strive by law to establish tyranny, When a lean treasurer shall in one year Make himself fat, his King and people bare: When the English Prince shall Englishmen despise, And think French only loyal, Irish wise; When wooden shoon shall be the English wear And Magna Charta shall no more appear: Then the English shall a greater tyrant know, Than either Greek or Latin story show: Their wives to 's lust exposed, their wealth to 's spoil, With groans to fill his treasury they toil; But like the Bellides ...
— English Satires • Various
... all-potent lever, but it must be furnished with a fulcrum on which to rest, and a direction in which to bear. Let us remark, first, that no signal privilege or right was ever yet achieved for Britain, that was not preceded by some signal wrong. From the times of Magna Charta down to the times of the Revolution, we find every triumph of liberty heralded in by some gross outrage upon it. The history of the British Constitution is a history of great natural rights established ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... acts of a misguided government, the American people only proved themselves possessed of the same noble spirit that procured for their English progenitors the confirmation of Magna Charta, and that hurled a tyrant from his throne. The heroes of the American revolution nobly fought and conquered; they entered the arena with fearful odds against them; they continued the struggle under every disadvantage, ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... also made myself quite clear in the interview to which I have referred that my feelings are not anti-English, for I shall never forget that liberal government and all forms of liberalism have had their origin, ever since the Magna Charta, in that great nation whom we so often love to call our cousins. But, with all of this, can you ignore the fact that England even today, without the further power and prestige victory in the present conflict would give her, practically dominates the high seas, that she ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... exists also a constitution, which defines the distribution of powers among the branches that compose the government and fixes the limits of authority vested in each. The British constitution is partly written, as found in the great historical documents of English history, such as Magna Charta (1215), the Petition of Right (1628), and the Bill of Rights (1689);[63] and partly unwritten, consisting of precedents and customs which are recognized as authoritative. The constitutions of the other monarchies of Europe were made during the nineteenth century, and consequently they are younger ...
— Our Government: Local, State, and National: Idaho Edition • J.A. James
... MAGNA CHARTA.—As rash as he was tyrannical, John engaged in a quarrel with Pope Innocent III. The monks of Canterbury appointed as archbishop, not the king's treasurer, whom he bade them choose, but another. The Pope neither heeded the ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... alter-service is restored. It is a time when earnest men and women cannot be trifled with on soul concerns. Their property may perish or be confiscated, but the right to unmolested worship is older than Magna Charta, and as inalienable as life itself. What is to be done? Resistance or emigration—which? Resist and die, say Cromwell and Wentworth, Eliot and Hampden. Emigrate and live, say the men and women who came by thousands from all parts of England during the reign of ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various
... when he confirmed "Magna Charta," used the expression, On the word of a gentleman, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... body was interred at Worcester; his bowels in Croxton Abbey Church, in Leicestershire, the abbot being his physician; and his heart at Croxden, in Staffordshire. Perhaps the most precious portion of his relics would be the hand that signed Magna Charta. (See ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 573, October 27, 1832 • Various
... contrary likewise to your own laws, which say that no plaint ought to be received or judgement passed, till the cause be heard, and witnesses present, to testify the plaint to be true, as Sir Edward Coke, 2nd part of Institutes upon the 29 chap. of Magna Charta, fol. 51-53. The Mirror ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... centuries. It blazed into a furious flame in the religious wars of Elizabeth, in the great rebellion of 1642, in the Jacobite struggle of 1689, in the religious war into which the rebellion of 1798 speedily degenerated. These facts are about as conspicuous in the history of Ireland as Magna Charta and the Commonwealth in the history of England. No one who knows Ireland will deny that the policy of Mr. Gladstone has contributed more than any other single cause to revive and deepen the divisions which every good Irishman deplores." ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... before the Constitution. Our institutions had their beginnings well-nigh with the beginning of time. They have developed through the ages. Magna Charta only marked a period in their growth; the assertion of the rights of the Commons marked another; our Revolution marked another; the adoption of ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... gentle clients by the "fanatical zealots of the Protestant Detectoral Association;" in moving tones referred to the shrinking of "quiet recluses, from the gaze of a rude, unsympathizing world;" cited cases from the time of Magna Charta, down; called upon the Court to vindicate Protestant justice, ending his peroration with the aphorism of Lord ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... you will have gone as far as seems possible at present. You will have local control of the theatres for police purposes and sanitary purposes without censorship; and I do not see what more is possible until we get a formal Magna Charta declaring all the Categories of libel and the blasphemy laws contrary to public liberty, and ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... "Any law of Congress not made in pursuance of, or in unison with the Constitution, is an illegal and void law." Coke declared an Act of Parliament against Magna Charta was null ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... high trust reposed in them, in the numerous enactments it exhibits, for the security both of person and property. Almost the first page which meets the eye in this venerable record contains the General Privilege, the Magna Charta, as it has been well denominated, of Aragon. It was granted by Peter the Great to the cortes at Saragossa, in 1283. It embraces a variety of provisions for the fair and open administration of justice; for ascertaining the legitimate powers intrusted to the cortes; for the security ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... joke on this subject. The state of affairs is becoming too serious. When sane human beings form a “Baronial Order of Runnymede,” and announce in their prospectus that only descendants through the male line from one (or more) of the forty noblemen who forced King John to sign the Magna Charta are what our Washington Mrs. Malaprop would call “legible,” the action attests a diseased condition of the community. Any one taking the trouble to remember that eight of the original barons died childless, and that the Wars of the Roses swept away nine tenths of what families the others may ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... Daisy came in just as she said this, and it transpired that this ill-fated but good-looking lady was the only one they either of them wanted to write about. So Alice gave it up to them and settled to do Magna Charta, and they could settle something between themselves for the one who would have to give up Mary Queen of Scots in the end. We all agreed that the story of that lamented wearer of pearls and black velvet would not make enough for ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... are dazed with admiration at one of those masterpieces of forensic pleading that have flung a deathless glory around the names of Russell and Whiteside; but the critic, with a superior toss of his head, assures you that this can be found in Magna Charta and the Statute book. Here ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... Gentleman moved, straight and stately, toward the Institution that he was rearing. Truly, the annual feeding of Stuffy Pete was nothing national in its character, such as the Magna Charta or jam for breakfast was in England. But it was a step. It was almost feudal. It showed, at least, that a Custom was not impossible ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... striking to be dismissed as accidental. The relation of the United States to the Territories has always been of a Colonial character. In the history of Territorial government the Ordinance of 1787 stands as the Magna Charta of the West. But the Great Ordinance like the Great Charter was in many respects crude, incomplete, and un-American. Place it by the side of the Constitution of the Territory of Iowa, and it is plain to see that in the course of fifty years marked changes had taken place—especially ...
— History of the Constitutions of Iowa • Benjamin F. Shambaugh
... contract, agreement, bargain; affidation^; pact, paction^; bond, covenant, indenture; bundobast^, deal. stipulation, settlement, convention; compromise, cartel. Protocol, treaty, concordat, Zollverein [G.], Sonderbund [G.], charter, Magna Charta [Lat.], Progmatic Sanction, customs union, free trade region; General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, GATT; most favored nation status. negotiation &c (bargaining) 794; diplomacy &c (mediation) 724; negotiator &c ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... answered, "but I suppose it is because they are too busy in the fight. When a self was dodging Battle Ax he hadn't much time to think about evolving a Magna Charta. But most of all I suppose it is just natural laziness. People refuse to think. It calls for effort. Most people would find it easier to pitch a load of hay than to think of ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... proceedings of the Council were assailed by argument, eloquence, and satire, in prose and verse, in squib and essay. One number, issued just after James Franklin's release, was nearly filled with passages from 'Magna Charta,' and comments upon the same, showing the unconstitutionality of the treatment to which he had been subjected. It is evident that a considerable number of the people of Boston most heartily sympathized with the Courant in its gallant contest for the ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... taxes. He shared with the duke in the administration of justice. There was a militia for the defense of the people's rights, commanded by a tysatski. Every ward of the city had a starost, charged with preserving the peace. It is said that a written constitution, partaking of the nature of the Magna Charta, was granted to Novgorod by Iaroslaf the Great. The duke's rights and privileges, his duties and his revenues, were carefully set down. He was entitled to the tribute of some of the volosts,—cantons or counties,—and to certain fines; he could ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... injuring those who differed from them when Roger Williams and his Baptist brethren obtained the charter of Rhode Island, with full power to rule themselves by any form of government they preferred? His magna charta concludes with these words, 'And let the saints of the Most High walk in this colony without molestation, in the name of Jehovah their God, for ever and ever.' And it has never been violated. Persecution has never sullied its annals. Freedom to worship God was ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... and a person might shave himself there in absolute comfort; but long before the days of pipes and taps an Englishman got his shaving water in a pewter ewer, and he still gets it so. It is one of the things guaranteed him under Magna Charta and he demands it as a right; but I, being but a benighted foreigner, left mine in the pitcher, and that evening the maid ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... will, Mistress Merrylack," said Mr. Bossolton; "and in a time when anarchy with gigantic strides does devastate and devour and harm the good old customs of our ancestors and forefathers, and tramples with its poisonous breath the Magna Charta and the glorious revolution, it is beautiful, ay, and sweet, mark you, Mrs. Merrylack, to behold a gentleman of the aristocratic classes or grades supporting the institutions of his country with such remarkable energy of sentiments and with—and with, Mistress ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of armour, had no iron saucepan on his head, and was not even carrying a gigantic lance. It seemed to be the same with everything else. In my illustrated History there was a picture of the Barons forcing King John to sign Magna Charta at Runnymede. They had beards, and wore long velvet dressing-gowns, with lovely, long, pointed shoes, and carried swords nearly as big as themselves. I asked my governess if there were any barons left, ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... King John of England, the people allowed the vicious king to get to a certain point, and then with their hands on their swords, ready to rebel if he resisted, they forced him to sign the great charter, Magna Charta, which has secured to Englishmen their rights from that day ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 58, December 16, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... the memory of this poor, timid creature for saving that dear remembrance of "Matchless Mitchel." How many, like him, have thought they were preaching a new gospel, when they were only reaffirming the principles which underlie the Magna Charta of humanity, and are common to the noblest utterances of all the nobler creeds! But spoken by those solemn lips to those stern, simpleminded hearers, the words I have cited seem to me to have a fragrance like the precious ointment of spikenard with which ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... 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. But, my friends, was it designed to be so? If our Heavenly Father would protect by law the eye ...
— An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South • Angelina Emily Grimke
... it all—all! Norman Conquest, Magna Charta, Runnymede, Reformation, Tudors, Stuarts, Mr. Milton and Mr. Burke, and I have read something of Mr. Herbert Spencer and Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall,' Reynolds' 'Mysteries of the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... we say? Let us spell out the Magna Charta of which we humbly catch sight. Let us say to the people of whom all peoples are made: "Wake up and understand, look and see; and having begun again the consciousness which was mown down by slavery, decide that ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... ideals have their roots deep down in English history. Not long ago I heard a seventh-grade class discussing the Magna Charta. It was a class in American history, and yet the events that the pupils had been studying occurred three centuries before the discovery of America. They had become familiar with the long list of abuses that led to the granting of the charter. They could tell very glibly what ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... could exercise over the propensity of young girls for confectionery, or over the improprieties of small boys who, yet immature for tobacco, touched pitch and were defiled. So by their influence was passed that immortal Section 7 of Chapter V. of the School Regulations,—the Magna Charta of childish liberty, so far as it goes, and the only safeguard which renders it prudent to rear a family within the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... English barons. At the coronation of Philip Augustus, the King of England, as Duke of Normandy, carried the first square banner, and the Duke of Guyenne the second. Against this king, a vassal of the foreigner, the War of the Barons burst forth. The barons imposed on the weak-minded King John Magna Charta, from which sprang the House of Lords. The pope took part with the king, and excommunicated the lords. The date was 1215, and the pope was Innocent III., who wrote the "Veni, Sancte Spiritus," and who sent to John Lackland the four cardinal virtues in the shape of four gold rings. The Lords persisted. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... She read on listlessly, vaguely, for a little while, going over the words mechanically, reading how Sir Somebody Something, a leading light of the Opposition, had been holding forth at an agricultural meeting, arguing that never since the date of Magna Charta had the national freedom been in such peril as it was at this hour; never had any Ministry so wantonly trifled with the rights of a great people, or so supinely submitted to the degradation of a once glorious country; never, within the memory of man, or, he ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... mutable in their apprehensions, doing one thing to-day, and soon again undoing what they did,—I conceive, to be judged in such an arbitrary way is repugnant to the fundamental law of England contained in Magna Charta, chap. 29, which says no freeman shall be disseized of his freehold but by the lawful judgment of his peers,—that is to say, by due process of law; which was also confirmed by the Petition of Right, by Act of Parliament, tertio Caroli I. And also such arbitrary jurisdiction ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... assured that from that hour, whatsoever the fortunes of the war, every one of those enrolled defenders of the Union had vindicated beyond all future question, for himself, his wife, and their issue, a title to American citizenship, and become heir to all the immunities of Magna Charta, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... any means presentable on the stage, that scene becomes obligatory in a drama of which he is the leading figure. 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. When Sir Herbert Tree revived the play, he repaired the poet's omission by means of an inserted tableau. Even Shakespeare had not the hardihood to let ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... King Richard. It was Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe, I need scarcely say, who got the Barons of England to league together and extort from the king that famous instrument and palladium of our liberties at present in the British Museum, Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury—the Magna Charta. His name does not naturally appear in the list of Barons, because he was only a knight, and a knight in disguise too: nor does Athelstane's signature figure on that document. Athelstane, in the first place, could not write; nor did he care a pennypiece about politics, ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... For it would be a most dangerous, as it is a most idle and most groundless, conceit to assume as a general principle, that the rights and liberties of the subject are impaired by the care and attention of the legislature to secure them. If so, very ill would the purchase of Magna Charta have merited the deluge of blood, which was shed in order to have the body of English privileges defined by a positive written law. This charter, the inestimable monument of English freedom, so long the boast and glory of this nation, ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... London in 1775. He wrote it to be read by Englishmen as well as Americans; and some of his reflections on liberty, justice, and Anglo-Saxon unity would not sound unworthily today. His sympathies were with "the principles of our Magna Charta Americana"; but he thought the threatened division of the English-speaking peoples the greatest evil that could befall civilization. His voluminous work discloses a man not only of wide mental outlook but a practical man with a sense of commercial values. Yet, instead of making a ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... league for mutual protection and cooperation. The very parchment on which the terms of this union were written "has been preserved as a testimony to the early independence of the Forest Cantons, the Magna Charta of Switzerland." The formation of this confederacy may be regarded as the first combined preparation of the Swiss for that great struggle in defence of their liberties, in the history of which fact and legend, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Repealers than the Government seem disposed to give. A hundred thousand Orangemen, with their colours flying, might yet meet a hundred thousand Repealers on the banks of the Boyne; and, on a field presenting so many solemn reminiscences to all, sign the Magna Charta of Ireland's independence. The Repeal banner might then be Orange and Green, flying from the Giant's Causeway to the Cove of Cork, and proudly look down from the walls of Derry ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... meet the expenses which had been incurred by the crown officers in quartering troops in Boston. The members nobly met this demand by returning to the Governor (July 15, 1769) a grandly worded state-paper, in which, claiming the rights of freeborn Englishmen, as confirmed by Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights, and as settled by the Revolution and the British Charter, they expressly declared that they never would make provision for the purposes mentioned in the two messages. On the same day, it was represented in the House ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... Government after the Revolution showed an inclination to interfere with the management of the Church, and they positively refused to take the oath of allegiance to King William and Queen Mary until they should, on their part, have sworn to the Solemn League—and Covenant, the Magna Charta, as they termed it, ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the Magna Charta of missions for India; and from that time until this the Christian missionary has found permission to preach his message in that land. He has also enjoyed there ample protection in the exercise of all his religious duties and work as a messenger of Christ. By this charter missions received State ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... I cannot entirely believe. Let her tell two or three old women about town that they are young and handsome, and give some well-timed parties, and she may still keep the society which she hath been used to. The times are not so hard as they once were, when a woman could not construe Magna Charta with anything like impunity. People were full as gallant many years ago. But the days are gone by wherein my lord-protector of the commonwealth of England was wont to go a lovemaking to Mrs. Fleetwood, with the ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of apostolic authority to bind and loose Fishermen and river raftsmen become ocean adventurers For myself I am unworthy of the honor (of martyrdom) Forbids all private assemblies for devotion Force clerical—the power of clerks Great Privilege, the Magna Charta of Holland Guarantees of forgiveness for every imaginable sin Halcyon days of ban, book and candle Heresy was a plant of early growth in the Netherlands In Holland, the clergy had neither influence nor seats Invented such Christian formulas as these (a curse) July 1st, ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger
... the way in which I was led, while teaching the Bakwains, to commence exploration, he will, I think, recognize the hand of Providence. Anterior to that, when Mr. Moffat began to give the Bible—the Magna Charta of all the rights and privileges of modern civilization—to the Bechuanas, Sebituane went north, and spread the language into which he was translating the sacred oracles, in a new region larger than France. Sebituane, at the same time, rooted ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... nothing at all about food—though he refused to be rationed by a despotic Government. On a handful of dates and a bit of coarse bread he had passed many a day of hard work when he was excavating in the East. One can always starve—for a purpose! The Squire conceived himself as out for Magna Charta—the root principles of British liberty. As for those chattering fellows of the Labour Party, let them conquer England if they could. While the Government ploughed up his land without leave, the Socialists would strip him of it altogether. Well, nothing for it but to fight! If ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Magna Charta of stupidity ever since—but your reverences plainly see, it has been obtained in such a manner, that the title to it is not worth a groat:—which by-the-bye is one of the many and vile impositions which gravity and grave folks have ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... way, in my boyish days at Dingle, we all of us firmly believed that King John had asked in what part of Kerry Ireland was. That question was our local Magna Charta, though what the origin of the tradition was ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... towards the end of July, 1356. He found the Emperor wholly occupied with that famous Golden Bull, the provisions of which he settled with the States, at the diet of Nuremberg, and which he solemnly promulgated at another grand diet held at Christmas, in the same year. This Magna Charta of the Germanic constitution continued to be the fundamental law of the empire ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... should be remembered, are a time-honoured institution; the Lincolnshire Cardyke and Fossdyke date from the period of the Roman occupation of this country. The Magna Charta of the early 13th century took cognizance, not only of the roads, called "The King's Highway," but also of inland navigation, under the term "Haut streames de le Roy." The latter half of the 18th century was remarkable for great achievements as regards ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... enactments constituted, as it were, a Magna Charta of the Jews in the Empire; Judaism was a favored cult in the provinces, a licita religio in the capital. At Alexandria Caesar confirmed and extended the religious and political privileges of the Jews, and ordered his decree to be inscribed on pillars of brass and set up in a public place. ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... which kept them in comparative ignorance, yet did not offer any obstacles to raising themselves in the social sphere. Before France could compete with England, she had to rid herself of the feudal system, and obtain a Magna Charta. She was above four centuries behind-hand here. She had to win her spurs through revolutions, like those of Cromwell's and that of 1688, and the still greater ones of Parliament. The Freethinkers of England prepared the Whig revolution of William, by advocating the only scheme which was at ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... means blood. But it will be God's force. When has a battle for humanity and liberty ever been won except by force? What barricade of wrong, injustice, and oppression has ever been carried except by force? Force compelled the signature of unwilling royalty to the great Magna Charta; force put life into the Declaration of Independence and made effective the Emancipation Proclamation; force beat with naked hands upon the iron gateway of the Bastile and made reprisal in one awful hour for centuries of kingly crime; ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... they have for them the compensation of such a liberty as they never knew before. The real reason why all southern Europe is in a turmoil to-day, is that American ideas of liberty are working there like leaven. We get our notions of liberty from the Bible and from the men who forced the Magna Charta from King John at Runnymede, but all other peoples in the world seem to be getting their ideas of liberty from us. That is what is the matter with the Old World to-day. The American idea is working like leaven. That is the force at work in France, where absolute divorce has just ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... as a public question. The discussion of taxation has accompanied the growth of free government in England and America from the time of Magna Charta. The control of the public purse has been found to give the key to political power, and therefore it has frequently become the occasion of conflict between the monarch and the people. But in our own national history since the adoption of ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter |
