the law of the land."

Again and again in the repeated confirmations of the Great Charter, in the
Petition of Rights, in the Habeas Corpus Act, in the Bill of Rights, in
the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, in the Virginia Bill of Rights, and,
finally, in the immortal Declaration of 1776--in all the great utterances
of striving for broader freedom which have marked the development of modern
liberty, sounds the same dominant note of insistence upon the inalienable
right of individual manhood under government but independent of government,
and, if need be, against government, to life and liberty.

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of the consequences which
followed from these two distinct and opposed theories of government. The
one gave us the dominion, but also the decline and fall of, Rome. It
followed the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, with the negation of
those rights in the oppression of the Reign of Terror, the despotism of
Napoleon, the popular submission to the second empire and the subservience
of the individual citizen to official superiority which still prevails so
widely on the continent of Europe. The tremendous potency of the other
subdued the victorious Normans to the conquered Saxon's conception of
justice, rejected the claims of divine right by the Stewarts, established
capacity for self-government upon the independence of individual character
that knows no superior but the law, and supplied the amazing formative
power which has molded, according to the course and practice of the common
law, the thought and custom of the hundred millions of men drawn from all
lands and all races who inhabit this continent north of the Rio Grande.

The mere declaration of a principle, however, is of little avail unless it
be supported by practical and specific rules of conduct through which
the principle shall receive effect. So Magna Charta imposed specific