"Magna Charta" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is that of Magna Charta. You will see that Sir Edward Coke, that great oracle of our law, and indeed all the great men who follow him, to Blackstone,[84] are industrious to prove the pedigree of our liberties. They endeavor to prove that the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Tiber, the Saxon street and school, the Borgo,[29] of whose miraculously arrested burning Raphael's fresco preserves the story to this day. And further he obtained from Leo the liberty of all Saxon men from bonds in penance;—a first phase this of Magna Charta, obtained more honourably, from a more honourable person, than that document, by which Englishmen of this day, suppose they live, move, and ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... "Sons of Liberty." The merchants, inspired then by liberty, resolved to import no more goods from England until the repeal of the Act. The orators also spoke. James Otis with fiery tongue appealed to Magna Charta. ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... 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 ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... suffered the cheap vengeance of having his body exhumed and its ashes scattered in the river Swift; Aquinas and Duns Scotus delivered philosophy from the tyranny of theology; Roger Bacon (1214) practically introduced the study of natural science; Magna Charta was signed in 1215; Marco Polo, whose statue I have seen among those of the gods, in a certain Chinese temple, began his travels in the thirteenth century; the university of Bologna was founded before 1200 for the untrammelled study of medicine ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... to conformity; in Ireland it was decided to confirm them in their possessions, to leave the government of the kingdom in their hands, and to strengthen their position by the Acts of Settlement and Explanation. These acts were hailed as "the Magna Charta of Irish Protestantism," but so far as the vast majority of the people were concerned, they were as cruelly unjust as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, or the edicts which banished the Moors and Jews ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... many institutions are of course Norman. An hereditary aristocracy, the laws of primogeniture and entail—these are Norman. By the help of them the Norman hoped to perpetuate his authority over the Saxon herd; and failed. Magna Charta, Cromwell, the Roundheads, the Puritans, the spirit of nonconformity, most of the limitations of the power of the Throne, the industrial and commercial greatness of Britain—these things are Anglo-Saxon. The American colonists (however many ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... bless 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 Mary anointed her Master's feet. I ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... land; he that walketh in a 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 all the wicked in the land, ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... of freedom, gracing the bosom of every sea—should be riddled from its staff and another substituted in its stead. Not less strange, however, did thousands of good Englishmen deem it, to behold the proud "British Lion" quail before his foe of "the wilderness," and the "Magna Charta" rent in twain. We must look upon it then as an exercise of God's retributive justice for our Sins as a people, or, that He designs that He shall ultimately be the more glorified by the separation. In the former case of course ...
— Letters of Ulysses S. Grant to His Father and His Youngest Sister, - 1857-78 • Ulysses S. Grant
... condemned, though the wholesale destruction of villages in our own Indian frontier wars and the methods employed on both sides in the civil war in Cuba appear to have borne much resemblance to it. In the treatment of merchants the rule of reciprocity which was laid down in Magna Charta is largely observed, and the Conference of Brussels in 1874 pronounced it to be contrary to the laws of war to bombard an unfortified town. The great Civil War in America probably contributed not a little ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... my last, upon Thursday, the Bill for Vicarages hath been carryed up to the Lords; and a Message to them from our House that they would expedite the Bill for confirmation of Magna Charta, that for confirmation of marriages, and other bills of publick concernment, which haue laid by them euer since our last sitting, not returned to us. We had then the Bill for six moneths assesment in consideration, ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... practical course which he ascribes to the English, and in accordance with which the great structure of British and American liberty has been built up generation after generation and century after century. Through all the seven hundred years since Magna Charta we have been shaping, adjusting, adapting our system to the new conditions of life as they have arisen, but we have always held on to everything essentially good that we have ever had in the system. We have never ...
— Experiments in Government and the Essentials of the Constitution • Elihu Root
... Majesty and Parliament." The words came ready to my lips: "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
... 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 of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... to compare the state of England under a free government with the state of France, disgraced, bankrupt, and incompetent, under autocratic rule. But the moral is never drawn by Voltaire. His references to political questions are slight and vague; he gives a sketch of English history, which reaches Magna Charta, suddenly mentions Henry VII., and then stops; he has not a word to say upon the responsibility of Ministers, the independence of the judicature, or even the freedom of the press. He approves of the English financial system, whose control by the ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... The legislature of Massachusetts, employed in establishing a code of laws under their new charter, passed an act containing the general principles respecting the liberty of the subject, that are asserted in magna charta, in which was the memorable clause, "no aid, tax, talliage, assessment, custom, benevolence, or imposition whatsoever, shall be laid, assessed, imposed, or levied, on any of his majesty's subjects ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... her head A cheerful radiance Glory spread: Courage, a youth of royal race, Lovelily stern, possess'd a place On her left hand, and on her right Sat Honour, clothed with robes of light; 220 Before her Magna Charta lay, Which some great lawyer, of his day The Pratt,[140] was officed to explain, And make the basis of her reign: Peace, crown'd with olive, to her breast Two smiling twin-born infants press'd; At her feet, couching, War was laid, And with a brindled lion play'd: Justice ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... chivalry, the pattern of honour, the fountain of generosity, the model to all succeeding ages of military glory? Richard the First. There is a king of the twelfth century. What was the first step of liberty? Magna Charta. That was the best thing ever done by lords. There are lords of the twelfth century. You must remember, too, that these lords were petty princes, and made war on each other as legitimately as the heads of larger communities ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... patriotic nation called the "Anglo-Saxons"; they shall be desperately defending themselves against certain French-speaking Scandinavians called Normans. He will deplore the defeat, but will say it was all for the best. Magna Charta he will have signed at Runnymede—probably he will have it drawn up there as well. He will translate the most famous clause by the modern words "Judgment of his peers" and "law of the land." He will represent the Barons ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... seventy-five years, had called together the States of his kingdom to reform abuses, to establish a free government, and to strengthen his throne,—a monarch who, at the very outset, without force, even without solicitation, had given to his people such a Magna Charta of privileges as never was given by any king to any subjects? Is it to be tamely borne by kings who love their subjects, or by subjects who love their kings, that this monarch, in the midst of these gracious acts, was insolently and cruelly torn from his ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... 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
... [Footnote: From "Pilgrimages to English Shrines." Magna Charta Island lies in the Thames, a ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... duties of mankind. The south was very much such a democracy as Rome and Greece were at some 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 was ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... known in history as the "Merry Monarch"; his reign was an inglorious one for England, though it is distinguished by the passing of the Habeas Corpus Act, one of the great bulwarks of English liberty next to the Magna Charta (1630-1685). ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... 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 transpired at the magisterial ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... correlations are good for me, but they may not be so vivid to others, especially where the concurrences are used. To fix the date of Magna Charta (1215), the pupil could memorise this Correlation—MAGNA CHARTA ... King John ... Jew's teeth ... DENTAL. But if the pupil did not know before that King John had granted that charter, and if he did not also know the story about the extraction of the Jew's teeth ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... another. We shall have another painful but profitable evening before a communion season with Mr. Prywell, and so we shall eat of that bread and drink of that cup. Emmanuel's livery will occupy us one evening, Mansoul's Magna Charta another, and her annual Feast-day another. Her Established Church and her beneficed clergy will take up one evening, some Skulkers in Mansoul another, the devil's last prank another, and then, to wind up with, Emmanuel's last speech and charge to Mansoul from ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... 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 out hordes of bloody savages, among whom no ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... fourteen northern counties from the 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
... law. 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 ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... general good of the colony," to which all "due submission and obedience" was promised. And this was followed a few years later in the sister colony of Massachusetts Bay by that "Body of Liberties" which, it is well said, may challenge comparison with Magna Charta itself or the latest Bill of Rights. Instinct with the spirit of common law, though somewhat ameliorating its rigor, these "rites, privileges and liberties," to be "impartially and inviolably enjoyed and observed throughout our ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... just finished his speech when Billy and Lydia got within hearing, and he introduced State Senator James Farwell as the chief speaker of the day. Farwell had considerable history to cover in his speech. He began with the Magna Charta and worked by elaborate stages through the French Revolution, the conquest of India, the death of Warren Hastings, the French and Indian War, the American Revolution and the Civil War ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... that better terms might be made with the 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 ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... 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
... have existed among the ancients, and must, at a very early age, have been both publicly and privately employed for the regulation of quantities. The modern English weights were adjusted by the 27th chapter of Magna Charta, or the great charter forced, by the barons, from King John at Runnymede, in Surrey. Therein it is declared that the weights, all over England, shall be the same, although for different commodities there were two different ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... 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. Thus it happened that suit continued ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... we'll quickly journey on 1199-1216 Until we reach the reign of John; A King whose list of crimes was heavy; He treated badly his young 'Nevvy'. Magna Charta He signed the Magna Charta. Yes; 1215 In twelve-fifteen, but we may guess With much ill grace and many a twist; For King John wrote an awful fist. John loses Normandy to France And by this beneficial chance In England comes ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison
... must protest against what certainly seems too contemptuous a rejection of a mass of historic evidence hitherto undoubted, except by the school of Voltaire; and of the hasty denial of the meaning of Christian and martyrologic symbols, as well known to antiquaries as Stonehenge or Magna Charta. ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... shocks which the divisions between kings and the nobles gave to empires, the chains of nations were more or less heavy. Liberty in England sprang from the quarrels of tyrants. The barons forced King John and King Henry III. to grant the famous Magna Charta, the chief design of which was indeed to make kings dependent on the Lords; but then the rest of the nation were a little favoured in it, in order that they might join on proper occasions with their pretended masters. This great Charter, which is ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... 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. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... I have 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 ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... [Footnote 2: Magna Charta Libertatum, the Great Charter of Liberties obtained by the barons of King John, June 16, 1215, not only asserted rights of the subject against despotic power of the king, but included among them right of insurrection against ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... stomach-ache to look at his oranges, the tooth-ache to look at his nuts. Of the latter commodity he had always a grim little heap, on which lay a little wooden measure which had no discernible inside, and was considered to represent the penn'orth appointed by Magna Charta. Whether from too much east wind or no—it was an easterly corner—the stall, the stock, and the keeper, were all as dry as the Desert. Wegg was a knotty man, and a close-grained, with a face carved out of very hard material, that had just as much play of ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... has not always existed. England was for ages a country sorely oppressed. But in the clashes of kings and nobles, it fortunately happens that the bonds of the peoples are more or less relaxed. English liberty was born of the quarrels of tyrants. The chief object of the famous Magna Charta, let it be admitted, was to place the kings in dependence upon the barons; but the rest of the nation was favoured also in some degree in order that it might range itself on the side of its professed protectors. The power of the nobility was undermined by Henry VII., ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... Edward I. kept his court in Lincoln a whole winter, and held another Parliament, in which he confirmed the Magna Charta of King ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... good reason to do so. To this day they regard it as the Magna Charta of their liberties. They were fully aware that under it the supreme authority passed to the Queen; but they were quite able to understand that their tribal lands were guaranteed to them. In other words, they were recognised as the owners in fee simple of the whole of New Zealand. As ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... Magistrates forbidden to scourge or execute a Roman citizen without giving him a chance to appeal to the people in their popular assembly. This "right of appeal" was regarded as the Magna Charta of Roman liberty. ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... by Carteret and by the Quakers. When the Jersey commerce began to be valuable, Andros demanded tribute from the ships, and shook the Duke's patent in the people's faces. They replied, rather feebly, with talk of Magna Charta. In 1682, the western part came by purchase into Quaker ownership, and, three years afterward, the eastern part followed by patent from the Duke. To trace the vicissitudes of this region to their end, it was surrendered to England in 1702, and united ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... 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 ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... 1220, when, at the battle of Damietta, Matthew Paris tells us, he resisted the shock of the infidels like a wall. He fought both in Flanders and in France, was at his King's side at Runnymede, and a witness to Magna Charta—a copy of which famous charter, made probably for his special use, is still ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... of Magna Charta by King John, in response to the demand of the Barons at Runnymede, gave birth to the Bar in its modern character. Articles 17 and 18 of that instrument provided that Common Pleas should not follow the court of the King, but should be held in a certain place, and that trials upon certain ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... 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 Mrs. Damer, have seen my new divine closet, nor the ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... are read to private judges of their orthodoxy, the confessional is established, and the 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 ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various
... principles of responsible government which he had analyzed in his earlier writings, including the book on "Congressional Government." Beneath the concrete campaign issues in New Jersey he saw the fundamental principles of Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. His trained habit of thinking through concrete facts to basic principles was serving him well in this campaign; his trained habit of clear exposition in the Princeton ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... and significance of the following; and state whether they are persons or books: Stratford-on-Avon, Magna Charta, Louvain, Onamataposa, Synod of Whitby, Bunker ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... the lessons suffered 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 ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... will help purify political life and develop a more ideal government but proves us to be dreamers of dreams. Yes, we are in a goodly company of dreamers, of Confucius, of Buddha, of Jesus, of the English Commons fighting for the Magna Charta, of the Pilgrims, of the American Revolutionists, of the Anti-slavery men and women. The seers and leaders of all times have been dreamers. Every step of progress the world has made is the crystallization of a dream into reality. To look forward to a time when men shall ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... feeling the strength of its wings both in 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
... 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
... 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 (1386), with that ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... bill pass into a law, would, as the petitioners apprehend, impose hardships upon the people too heavy to be borne, and create discontents in the minds of his majesty's subjects; would subvert all the rights and privileges of a Briton; and overturn Magna Charta itself, the basis on which they are built; and, by these means, destroy that very liberty, for the preservation of which the present royal family was established upon the throne of Britain; for which reasons, such a law could never be obeyed, or much blood would ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... 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 ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... equally sure that almost every 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. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... 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 leaders of foreign mercenaries, ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... rely upon 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 lairs from which they might issue to disturb human ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... whatever amount of virgin gold he sees fit to encumber himself, and no one has any right at all to hinder and detain him in this procedure. I formulated that at last to myself, and repeated it over as a sort of private Magna Charta of ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... 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
... lived in its ashes, and it rose, 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 the ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... law provides that in actions for debt, execution should not issue against effects of the debtor which are indispensably necessary to him to maintain his position, such as the horses of a count or the armor of a knight. (Dialog. de Scaccario.) Magna Charta extended this provision so as to include the agricultural implements and cattle of the peasantry. The moment these laws, in consequence of a false principle of humanity, except anything but what is absolutely necessary, they injure credit. Thus, for instance, in Brazil, a law ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... slogan, came to them from across the sea and was first uttered in England before the days of Magna Charta. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... whose ancestors 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 and backward to comply, blasting ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... BURGH, Earl of Kent, chief justiciary of England under King John and Henry III.; had charge of Prince Arthur, but refused to put him to death; was present at Runnymede at the signing of Magna Charta; d. 1234. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... contents of the Twelve Tables, which is really as monstrous as if we could fancy ourselves reading in the pages of a native historian of mark, Hume, Henry, or Lingard, some blunder, into which a schoolboy could not fall, about the contents of Magna Charta, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Rights, or any other well known English law, on which the constitution of the country is primarily founded. In a work given out as written by Tacitus we are told that the Twelve Tables first fixed interest for usury at an "uncia," or twelfth part ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... 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 ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... on parchment. What the convention may agree upon, draw up, and the people ratify by their votes, is no constitution, for it is extrinsic to the nation, not inherent and living in it—is, at best, legislative instead of constitutive. The famous Magna Charta drawn up by Cardinal Langton, and wrung from John Lackland by the English barons at Runnymede, was no constitution of England till long after the date of its concession, and even then was no constitution of the state, ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... latter reign, and was taken prisoner by the king's party at Rochester Castle; his own castle at Belvoir also falling into the royal hands. He was likewise one of the twenty-five barons, whose signatures were attached to Magna Charta and the charter of Forests at Runnemede. This lord richly endowed the priory of Belvoir, and founded and endowed a hospital at Wassebridge, between Stamford and Uffingham, where he was buried in 1236. Isabel, of the house of Albini, now married to Robert de Ros, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 564, September 1, 1832 • Various
... preliminary 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 ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... makers, including the master one of all, von Moltke, set out to use German docility and obedience in the creation of a machine of singular industry and rigidity and ruthless discipline. Similar methods would mean revolt in democratic France and individualistic England where every man carries Magna Charta, talisman of his own "rights," in ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... rise. The extracts from the Anglo-Saxon laws, the sources of the Common law, I wrote in their original, for my own satisfaction;* but I have added Latin, or liberal English translations. From the time of Canute to that of the Magna Charta, you know, the text of our statutes is preserved to us in Latin only, and some ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... 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 or willing to accept. How far these were from administering ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... what proved to be a colony and Republic. The extent to which the Netherlands exercised an influence in shaping the future of the American Commonwealth has not been determined, and can not be, though Douglas Campbell has maintained that to the Dutch, and not to the English Puritan, nor yet to the Magna Charta, does the American Republic owe its chief debt. The theme is productive and stimulative and worthy, though the facts are indeterminate. America is attached to the Dutch Republic as a bold attempt whose failure was nobler than many successes. The Puritan ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... to England; and they establish themselves at hotels, or on steamboats and diligences, with a certain air of ownership that is very pleasant. I am not very fresh in my geology; but it is my impression that Switzerland was created especially for the English, about the year of the Magna Charta, or a little later. The Germans who come here, and who don't care very much what they eat, or how they sleep, provided they do not have any fresh air in diningroom or bedroom, and provided, also, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the apologists 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 ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Charles I.. The next and last room of the manuscript department is appropriated to the ancient royal library of manuscripts, and Sir Robert Cotton's, with a few-later donations. On the table, in the middle of the room, is the famous Magna Charta of King John; it is written on a large roll of parchment, and was much damaged in the year 1738, when the Cotton library took fire at Westminster, but a part of the broad seal ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... formed a council and passed measures to secure their rights. After two years of 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 ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... copy of the Gospels said to have been used to administer the oath at the coronation of King Athelstan. Other treasures are the original Bull of Pope Leo X. conferring on King Henry VIII. the title of Defender of the Faith; and a contemporary and official copy of Magna Charta, granted by King John, and dated at Runnymede, 15th June, in the seventeenth year of his reign, which was given to Cotton by Sir Edward Dering. Both these precious documents were unfortunately damaged by the fire at Ashburnham House, but have since been very skilfully ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... of Englishmen for their Magna Charta and Bill of Rights, and that of Americans for their national Constitution, seem weak in comparison with the intense gratitude and reverence of the Five Nations for the "Great Peace" which Hiawatha and his colleagues established ...
— Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation • Horatio Hale
... little; all this is mixed with reading; that is, I can't say I read much, but I pick up a good deal of reading. The only thing I have done that can compose a paragraph, and which I think you are Whig enough to forgive me, is, that on each side of my bed I have hung MAGNA CHARTA, and the warrant for King Charles's execution, on which I have written Major Charta; and I believe, without the latter, the former by this time would be of very little importance. You will ask where Mr. Bentley is; confined with five sick infants, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... they possessed. Make all needful deductions, and there remains a vast residuum of moral beauty and grandeur, interwoven with three centuries of our history. The Bible, as English literature, as old-world history, as moral teaching, as the Magna Charta of the poor and of the oppressed, the most democratic book in the world, could not be spared. The mass of the people should not be deprived of the one great literature which is open to them; not shut out from the perception of their relations with the whole past history of ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... delegation when he finds his chosen servants unfaithful or inefficient; and so have back again clean his own great and imperishable human rights. A wise law and one enforced is tolerable. An unjust and impure law is intolerable, and it is no wrong to cast off allegiance to it. If so, Magna Charta was wrong, and the American Revolution earth's greatest example of ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... was published in 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 career ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... 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." Athelstane also quarrels with the king, whose orders he disobeys, and Rotherwood is attacked by the royal army. No one was of real service in the way of fighting except Ivanhoe,—and how could he take up that cause? "No; be hanged to me," said the knight bitterly. "This is ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... public is here represented by the great endowed libraries of the seven universities, the British Museum," &c., &c. But prima facie, this was that selling of justice which is expressly renounced in Magna Charta; and why were proprietors of copyright, more than other proprietors, to make an "acknowledgment" for their rights? But supposing that just, why, especially, to the given public bodies? Now, for my part, I think that this admits of an explanation: ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... 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 to answer ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... with which the guardians of the realm discharged the 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 ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... such a deed? Says Black-stone, "If any one that hath commission of martial authority doth, in time of peace, hang, or otherwise execute any man by colour of martial law, this is murder; for it is against Magna Charta."* [* Commentaries, b. ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... smote the Romans in the Teutoburger-Wald, and the great Caesar wailed in vain to his slain general, 'Varus, give me back my legions!' Teach your children that the Congress which sits at Washington is as much the child of Magna Charta as the Parliament which sits at Westminster; and that when you resisted the unjust demands of an English king and council, you did but that which the free commons of England held the right to do, and did, ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... only second in importance to Magna Charta itself as a landmark in the history of England. The suspicious fears of his people compelled Edward to repeat the confirmation at London in 1300, and again at Lincoln in 1301—an insult to his honesty ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... combined all three characters; professed indifference to place was only a 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 ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Workshop. By a 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
... 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 the ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... capital conciliating labour such as 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
... term used in Magna Charta as including franchises, privileges, immunities, and all the rights which belong to that class. Professor Sullivan says, the term signifies the "privileges that some of the subjects, whether single persons or bodies corporate, have above others by the lawful grant of the king; as the chattels ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... is no mere recent phase in human history. It is human history. It permeated the ancient life of early peoples. It blazed anew in the middle ages. It was written in Magna Charta. ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... 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 everything must be ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... Magna Charta, as it was called (it is now like an almanack of the same date), was no more than compelling the government to renounce a part of its assumptions. It did not create and give powers to government in ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... 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 he refused, and on the 6th July he finished his career ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... 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 controls ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... poet-preacher of the English Church, said that the salvation of one soul is worth more than the framing of the Magna Charta of a thousand worlds. ...
— The Art of Soul-Winning • J.W. Mahood
... critter's got one on 'em. But there's no two men alike, so there's no two dyspepsies alike. There never was, an' never will be. 'T 's exackly like the human family, divided into two great classes, black an' white, long-heel an' short-heel. Jes' so ... nervous ... mucous ... Magna Charta ... Palladium of our liberties ... ark of our safety ... manifest destiny ... Constitootion of our forefathers ... fit, bled, an' died ... independence forever ... one an' inseparable ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... Edward Gibbon Wakefield, both of whom accompanied the new Governor-General to Canada, and who are generally believed to have inspired, if they did not actually write, the greater part of the celebrated Report which became the Magna Charta of the self-governing ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... noble as that wherein this country first stood committed by its chief officer to Emancipation, the noblest document which ever passed from president or potentate to the people; a paper which, in the eyes of future ages, will cast Magna Charta itself into the shade, and rank with the glorious manumission of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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 ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... 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! ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... interests in the new settlement of the crown, formed a 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, as shown in Baker's discriminating ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... justice requires such a policy? What motive of public welfare can fail to condemn it? Lands held by corporations were regarded by ancient laws as held in mortmain, or by "dead hand," and from the time of Magna Charta corporations required the royal license to hold land, because such holding was regarded as in derogation of public policy and common right. Preemption is itself a special privilege, only authorized by ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson
... said I. 'I hope I am too good a subject for that. But for a nameless fellow with a bald head and a pair of gingham small-clothes, why certainly! 'Tis my birthright as an Englishman. Where's Magna Charta, else?' ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sheriffs, threatening them with a prosecution if they should take any part in the election. This menace alarmed the sheriffs, and prevented their interference; but the delegates were chosen, and a resolution was passed, declaring the conduct of the attorney-general to be a violation of Magna Charta. The attorney-general filed informations against the high-sheriffs of various counties for convening and presiding at similar meetings; but the national congress met, and passed several resolutions, importing that the appointment of that assembly, and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... existed 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 our Constitution ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... malcontents the Coronation Charter of Henry I., which the barons accepted as a declaration of the views and demands of their party. He was at the head of the barons in their struggle with the king, and his name appears as that of the first witness to the famous Magna Charta. John at once applied to the pope, and obtained from him the abrogation of the charter and a papal order to Langton to excommunicate the king's enemies. This he refused to do. John overran the country with foreign mercenaries, and his cruelties eventually resulted ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... of the deliberations 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 ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the offender, the world at large should reconsider its verdict. This is what practically took place in the George Eliot and Lewes instance. Weighed, not by the steelyard of general principle, but by the delicate chemical balance of special detail, they were not found wanting. The Magna Charta is still only a pious aspiration. 'Every man shall be tried by a jury of his peers.' How profound! For only our equals can know our travails and temptations. How, now, if we had to try Shakespeare! which ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... king against the people, Catholic against Protestant, and, within the latter group, Anglican, Presbyterian, and independent, each against one another. All sorts of unjust and inhuman practices were indulged in. It would seem that the spirit of Magna Charta and of the Christian ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... the battlefield, with a yet higher and nobler purpose denounce the base uses to which the victory has been applied. The old shibboleths of victory are proclaimed as living principles. Whatever else may be lost, the principles of Magna Charta have survived the conflict of arms. The edicts of the enemy abolish all securities of life, liberty, and property; defeat all the rightful purposes of government, and renounce all remedies, ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... Paul's to consider the misgovernment and illegal acts of King John. Archbishop Langton laid before the assembly the charter of Henry I., and commented on its provisions. The result was an oath, taken with acclamation, that they would, if necessary, die for their liberties. And this led up to Magna Charta. But it was a scene as ignominious as the first surrender before Pandulf, when Pope Innocent accepted the homage of King John as the price of supporting him against his barons, and the wretched King, before the altar of St. Paul, ceded his kingdom as a fief ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham
... duty, and none overstep it, there will come thereof successful and happy voyages. There must be discipline, subordination, and law. The republican theory stops with the shore. "Obey orders, though you break owners," is the Magna Charta of the main. This can be well and wisely carried out only with some homogeneity of the ship's company, with a community of feeling and a community of interest. Everybody who has been off soundings knows, or ought to know, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... 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
... recent English text-writers, and a reference to two or three old cases. I read first from Mr. Anstey's Notes upon the Reform Act of Great Britain of 1867. The writer in his comment upon the words of the act, "every man of full age," etc., commences by showing that the term man in the act, as in Magna Charta and other statutes, is epicene—means both men and women. And he then goes on to show that to construe this phrase, "every man," to include every woman also, is in strict accordance with the common law from old times to the present. I read from ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... — N. compact, 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 (agent) 758. ratification, completion, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... a sensible man, and a loyal subject, Mr. Dillon. The habeas corpus, Miss Alice, was obtained in the reign of King John, along with Magna Charta, for the security of the throne, by his majesty's barons; some of my own blood were of the number, which alone would be a pledge that the dignity of the crown was properly consulted. As to our piratical countrymen, Christopher, ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... belonging to Sir Lionel's estate and dating, in part, to the days of King John. Flicking the ash from my cigarette, I studied the ancient tower wondering idly what deeds had had their setting within its shadows, since the Angevin monarch, in whose reign it saw the light, had signed the Magna Charta. ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... throwing up her arms in consternation, "he is very backward in his history, too! Would you believe it, he couldn't recollect when Magna Charta was signed on my asking him the ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... unlawful authority, it is a sufficient provocation to all people out of compassion; and where the liberty of the subject is invaded, it is a provocation to all the subjects of England, etc.; and surely a man ought to be concerned for Magna Charta and the laws: and if any one, against the law, imprisons a man, he is an ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... endeavoured to be preserved, as far as human reason and the law of this nation have been able to preserve them, by an immediate and most sacred obligation on the consciences of the Princes of this realm. For they that consult Magna Charta shall find, that as all your predecessors were at their Coronation, so you also were sworn before all the Nobility and Bishops then present, and in the presence of God, and in his stead to him that anointed you, to maintain the Church-lands, and the rights belonging ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... smoothed itself out into intellectual paragraphs. And from week to 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 ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... momentary advantages. The 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 ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... delicate matters as the treatment of Joan of Arc. Political history was for him still the most important, although to one branch of it, constitutional history, he was totally blind. So were almost all Englishmen then, even Shakespeare, whose King John contains no allusion to Magna Charta. In his work On the Inventors {582} of Things Vergil showed the depth of his insight into the importance in history of culture and ideas. While his treatment of such subjects as the origin of myths, man, marriage, religion, language, poetry, drama, music, sciences and ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Krupps who plunged the Central Empires into the pit, Paul, but Bernhardi, Nietzsche and What's-his-name. Wagner's music has done more to form the German character than Bismarck's diplomacy. Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth means more to England than Magna Charta." ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... THE POPE: 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 king nor confirmed their choice, but made ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... shelter and safety. So the Church bent again to its task, and bade the Spaniard Dominic arm new levies with the best weapons of science, and flaunt the name of Aristotle on the Church banners along with that of Saint Augustine. The year 1215, which happened to be the date of Magna Charta and other easily fixed events, like the birth of Saint Louis, may serve to mark the triumph of the schools. The pointed arch revelled at Rheims and the Gothic architects reached perfection at Amiens just as Francis ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... Hitherto a framed engraving of George III had hung over his mantle-piece; but early in this, his third year, the frame had disappeared for a few days, and when it reappeared, the solemn face of John Milton looked out from it, while the honest monarch had retired into a portfolio. A facsimile of Magna Charta soon displaced a large colored print of "A Day With the Pycheley", and soon afterwards the death warrant of Charles I. with its grim and resolute rows of signatures and seals, appeared on the wall in a place of honour, ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... that abandoned Tory, Thought cutting throats was reaping glory, Until the stubborn Whigs of Sparta Taught him great Nature's Magna Charta; How mighty Rome her fiat hurl'd Resistless o'er a bowing world, And, kinder than they did desire, Polish'd mankind with sword and fire; With much, too tedious to relate, Of ancient and of modern date, But ending ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... 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
... as his crimes are, they form half the Magna Charta of the republic,* and the authority of the Convention is still ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... 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
... masterpiece of Ferdinand Reitman, Zenith's busiest architect. It was lofty and half-timbered, with Tudor leaded casements, an oriel, a somewhat musicianless musicians'-gallery, and tapestries believed to illustrate the granting of Magna Charta. The open beams had been hand-adzed at Jake Offutt's car-body works, the hinge; were of hand-wrought iron, the wainscot studded with handmade wooden pegs, and at one end of the room was a heraldic and hooded stone fireplace which the club's advertising-pamphlet asserted to be not only larger than ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... me as no other mortal man did, or ever will; and oh! Charley, a great deal because he is Sir Victor Catheron of Catheron Royals, with a rent-roll of twenty thousand a year, and more, and a name that is older than Magna Charta. If there be any virtue in truth, there—you have it, plain, unvarnished. I like him—who could help it; but love him—no!" She clasped her hands above her head, and gazed dreamily out at the sparkling sunlit ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... of the Imperial Government by no means stayed the voice of local agitation, and the stream of petitions continued to grow. In a further letter to Governor Murray, dated December 5th, 1898, Mr Chamberlain laid down the great constitutional doctrine which is the Magna Charta of Greater Britain. Every student of colonial politics should be ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... however bold enough to make head against this powerful league, and by their steady opposition to the King, and their moderate demands when their efforts were crowned with success, immortalized their names: John was obliged to sign out two famous charters—the first called Magna Charta, or the Charter of Liberties; the second the Charter of Forests; which two charters have since been the foundation of the liberties of this nation. Some time after, having thrown himself into a fever by eating peaches, he died at Newark October ...
— A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies - A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses • Unknown
... your arguments; that, after education such as this, we can stand silent witnesses while you sell our birthright of liberty to save from a timely death an effete political organization? No, as we respect womanhood, we must protest against this desecration of the magna charta of American liberties; and with an importunity not to be repelled, our demand must ever be, "No compromise of human rights"—"No admission to the Constitution of inequality of rights or disfranchisement on account ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... 'I am truly glad to visit America. I do not consider the magna charta,' says he, 'or gas balloons or snow-shoes in any way a detriment to the beauty and charm of your American women, skyscrapers or the architecture of your icebergs. The next time,' says Andy, 'that I go after the ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... pilgrimages to the Holy Land and that is, that there arose on all sides a desire for liberty and the growth of a spirit of nationality that worked to the destruction of absolute government. The power of the common people began to assert itself. In 1215, England forced from John Lackland the Magna Charta, the foundation of all the liberty of English speaking people even in modern times. The very year in which Dante was born, representatives of the townspeople were admitted as members of the English Parliament. In France, during the thirteenth century, the centralization ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... of taxation 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 the Constitution, taxation has not had ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... 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
... 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 ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... although some of those standing for the lower strata were suitably disguised. The peerage was well represented, so was Judah; there were women entitled to wear coronets dancing with men entitled to wear the broad arrow, and men whose forefathers had signed Magna Charta dancing with chorus girls from ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... 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, ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... oak-panel of the game-room door; how, when Long Merridew was carrying the ball, he 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
... read and write. The whole population can read and write the Koran. This Saharan fact of the barbarians of The Desert suggests painful reflections to honest-minded Englishmen. We may boast of our liberties, our Magna Charta, our independence of character, our commerce, our wealth, the extent of the world which Providence (too good to us) has committed to our care. But after all we cannot boast of what the barbarians of The Desert boast. We ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... virgin, seated on a throne of gold. Her name, as they told me, was Public Credit. The walls, instead of being adorned with pictures and maps, were hung with many Acts of Parliament written in golden letters. At the upper end of the hall was the Magna Charta, with the Act of Uniformity on the right hand, and the Act of Toleration on the left. At the lower end of the hall was the Act of Settlement, which was placed full in the eye of the virgin that sat upon the throne. ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... birth. Now this has been nothing more than a demand for greater liberty and more extended rights on the part of the commoners of England, in proportion as they found themselves a more important body in the state. It has not been a case of Magna Charta, but it is still analogous; for they have demanded that the barrier raised between them and the aristocracy should be thrown down, as soon as they possessed all the advantages, with the exception of that nominal rank, the title too often conferred without discrimination ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... officers authority to enter not only stores, but private dwellings, break open chests, boxes, and closets in search of smuggled goods. Now if there is anything that Englishmen prize, it is the liberty secured by Magna Charta. Every man's house is his castle. Writs of Assistance violated the fundamental principle of English liberty. Our great lawyer, Mr. James Otis, has immortalized his name by his masterly oration in opposition to the ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... prior thereto; and the laws, of which this is one, are declared to be the laws of Edward the Confessor, which William re-enacted. Selden, in "The Laws and Government of England," p. 34, speaks of this law as the first Magna Charta. He says: ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher |
