ter of the crown in the Commons, Lord John Russell, opposed the bill, and said: "Pass this bill, and where will be the boasted safety of our houses? It would establish general tyranny."

The prohibition of "general warrants." The warrant is the paper which justifies the arresting person to commit so grave an act as depriving a citizen, or alien, of personal liberty. It is important, therefore, to know who has the right to issue such warrants, against whom it may be done, and how it must be done, in order to protect the individual against arbitrary police measures. The Anglican race has been so exact and minute regarding this subject, that the whole theory of the warrant may be said to be peculiarly Anglican, and a great self-grown institution. "A warrant," the books say, "to deprive a citizen of his personal liberty should be in writing, and ought to show the authority of the person who makes it, the act which is authorized to be done, the name or description of the party who is authorized to execute it, and of the party against whom it is made; and, in criminal cases, the grounds upon which it is made." The warrant should name the person against whom it is directed; if it does not, it is called a general warrant, and Anglican liberty does not allow it. Where it is allowed there is police government, but not the government for freemen. It is necessary that the person who executes the warrant be named in it. Otherwise the injured citizen, in case of illegal arrest, would not know whom he should make responsible; but if the person be named, he is answerable, according to the Anglican principle that every officer remains answerable for the legality of all his acts, no matter who directed them to be done. Indeed, we

1 A warrant to apprehend all persons suspected, or all persons guilty, etc. etc. is illegal. The person against whom the warrant runs, ought to be pointed out. The law on this momentous subject was laid down by Lord Mansfield in the case of Money vs. Leach, 3 Bur. 1742, where the "general warrant" which had been in use since the revolution, directing the officers to apprehend the "authors, printers, and publishers" of the famous No. 45 of the North Briton, was held to be illegal and void.

may say the special warrant is a death-blow to police govern

ment.

The Constitution of the United States demands that "no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized, etc."1

The warrant is held to be so important an element of civil liberty, that a defective warrant is considered by the common law of England and America one of the reasons which reduce the killing of an officer from murder to manslaughter. The reader will see this from the following passage, which I copy from a work of authority both here and in England. I give the passage entire, because it relates wholly to individual liberty, and I shall have to recur to it. The learned jurist

says:

"Though the killing of an officer of justice, while in the regular execution of his duty, knowing him to be an officer, and with intent to resist him in such exercise of duty, is murder, the law in that case implying malice, yet where the process is defective or illegal, or is executed in an illegal manner, the killing is only manslaughter, unless circumstances appear, to show express malice; and then it is murder. Thus, the killing will be reduced to manslaughter, if it be shown in evidence that it was done in the act of protecting the slayer against an arrest by an officer acting beyond the limits of his precinct; or, by an assistant, not in the presence of the officer; or, by virtue of a warrant essentially defective in describing either the person accused, or the offence; or, where the party had no notice, either expressly, or from the circumstances of the case, that a lawful arrest was intended; but,

1 The reader will find a copy of the Constitution of the United States in the appendix.

* This is section 123 of vol. iii. of Dr. Greenleaf on Evidence, which I have copied by the permission of my esteemed and distinguished friend. I have left out all the legal references. The professional lawyer is acquainted with the book, and the references would be important to him alone.

on the contrary, honestly believed that his liberty was assailed without any pretence of legal authority; or, where the arrest attempted, though for a felony, was not only without warrant, but without hue and cry, or fresh pursuit; or, being for a misdemeanor only, was not made flagrante delicto; or, where the party was on any other ground, not legally liable to be arrested or imprisoned. So, if the arrest, though the party were legally liable, was made in violation of law, as, by breaking open the outer door or window of the party's dwelling-house, on civil process; for such process does not justify the breaking of the dwelling-house, to make an original arrest; or, by breaking the outer door or window, on criminal process, without previous notice given of his business, with demand of admission, or something equivalent thereto, and a refusal."

The Habeas Corpus Act. This famous act of parliament was passed under Charles II., and is intended to insure to an arrested person, whether by warrant or on the spot, that at his demand he be brought, by the person detaining him, before a judge, who may liberate, him, bail him, or remand him, no matter at whose command or for what reasons the prisoner is detained. It allows of no "administrative arrests," as extra-judicial arrests are called in France, or imprisonment for reasons of state. The habeas corpus act further insures a speedy trial,' a trial by the law of the land and by the lawful court-three points of the last importance. It, moreover, guarantees that the prisoner know for what he is arrested, and may properly prepare for trial. The habeas corpus act did by no means first establish all these principles, but numberless attempts to secure them had failed, and the act may be considered as the ultimate result of a long struggle between law and the individual on the one hand, and power on the

1 Long imprisonments before trial are customary means resorted to on the continent of Europe in order to harass the subjects. Guerrazzi and other liberals were sentenced, in Tuscany, on the first of July, 1853, after having been imprisoned for fifty months before ever being brought to trial. It is useless to mention more instances; for, long imprisonment before trial is the rule in absolute governments whenever it suits them.

other. The history of this act is interesting and symptomatic.1

The Constitution of the United States prohibits the suspension of the habeas corpus act, "unless when, in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it;" and Alexander Hamilton says, in the "Federalist": "The establishment of the writ of habeas corpus, the prohibition of ex post facto laws and of titles of nobility, to which we have no corresponding provisions in our constitution," (therefore personal liberty, or protection and safety, supremacy of the law and equality,) "are perhaps greater securities to liberty than any it contains ;" and, with reference to the first two, he justly adds the words of "the judicious Blackstone."

All our state constitutions have adopted these important principles. The very opposite of this guarantee was the "lettre de cachet," or is the arbitrary imprisonment at present in France.

A witness of singular weight, as to the essential importance of Anglican personal liberty, must not be omitted here. The Emperor Napoleon III. who, after Orsini's attempt to assassinate him, obtained the "law of suspects" according to which the French police, or administration, (not the courts of justice,) may transport a "suspect" for seven years, wrote, in earlier days, with admiration of English individual liberty.*

1 The appendix contains the habeas corpus act.

2 Paper, No. lxxxiv.

3 Blackstone's Commentaries, vol. i. page 136. Note, in the "Federalist."

4 In 1854 a complete edition of the emperor's works was published. In that edition was a chapter headed De la Liberté individuelle en Angleterre. In it are the following passages:

"No inhabitant of Great Britain (excepting convicts) can be expelled from the United Kingdom. Any infraction of this clause (the habeas corpus act) would be visited with the severest penalties." He remarks that we have no public prosecutor, the attorney-general interfering only on extraordinary occasions; and if criminals sometimes escape justice, personal liberty is the less endangered. "In England, authority is never influenced by passion; its proceedings are always moderate, always legal;" there is "no violation of the citizen's domicile, so common in

There was in England, until within a recent date, a remarkable deviation from the principles of personal liberty-the impressment. The crown assumed the right to force any able-bodied man on board a man-of-war, to serve there as sailor. There has always been much doubt about this arrogated privilege of the crown, and, generally, sailors only were taken, chiefly in times of war and when no hands would freely enlist. Every friend of liberty will rejoice that the present administration has taken in hand a new plan of manning the navy, by which this blemish will be removed.'

France;" family correspondence is inviolate, and no passports bar the most perfect freedom of traffic,-"passports, the oppressive invention of the Committee of Public Safety, which are an embarrassment and an obstacle to the peaceable citizen, but which are utterly powerless against those who wish to deceive the vigilance of authority." A law deprived of the general support of public opinion would be a mere scrap of paper. "It suffices for us to note this fact, that in France, where such jealousy is shown of everything which touches equality and national honor, people do not attach themselves so religiously to personal liberty. The tranquillity of the citizen may be disturbed, his domicile may be violated, he may be made to undergo for whole months a preventive imprisonment personal guarantees may be despised, and a few generous men shall raise their voices; but public opinion will remain calm and impassible as long as no political passion is awakened. There lies the greatest reason for the violence of authority; it can be arbitrary because there is no curb to check it. In England, on the contrary, political passions cease the moment a violation of common right is committed; and this, because England is a country of legality, and France has not yet become so; because England is a country solidly constituted, while France struggles by turns for forty years between revolutions and counter-revolutions, and the sanctity of principle has yet to be created there."

1 The plan has not yet been published, but one of the ministers, Sir James Graham, said in the Commons, in April, 1853:

66

"The first point on which all the authorities consulted were agreed is, that whatever measures are taken, must rely for success on the voluntary acceptance of them by the seamen, and that any attempt to introduce a coercive mode of enlistment would be followed by mischievous consequences and failure." The difficult question does not yet seem to be wholly settled (1859.) It seems difficult to obtain a sufficient number of seamen to man the fleet in emergencies. In France seamen are drafted, as soldiers are for the army.