The southern aegis, and Harford County intelligencer., 1862-07-19
From he Newdrk N. J. .Joarsal.
CONSTITUTIONAL SECURITIES.


bind both rulers and ruled, and to pre-
scribe the duties andpowers of both. Not
that there had been no pledges before by
those in authority, through coronation
oaths sor charters wrested as at Runny-
mede from tyrant kings, or bills of rights
voted for BY Hampdens, Cokes, st. Johns,
but seldom if ever obeyed. All these,
however, were imperfect almost chaotic.
They were mere fragments of constitution
al forms rude elements of rocks, rough
from the quarry, to be afterwards fashion
ed into useful works and polished by skill
and experience, None of them were de-
liberate compacts by and with the people
at large and binding voluntary givers, but
rather they were concessions of intermedi-
ate despots, and extorted by rivals in pow
er, and made to them, rather the masses.
Our Constitution, on the contrary, is a
mutual recognition of rights amongst
equals, standing on a common platform as
immortal, accountable free agents, co-ope-
rating aud consulting together in the great
work of self-govcrnment. Anxious to
render that constitution rich in the. secu-
rites which nearly six thousand years of
experience had treasured up and spread
open to their free choice, they went fur
ther, and imposed checks the most rigid
and solemn on various abuses, that had
for ages filled prisons with tears and scaf-
folds with victims They prohibited the
suspension of the writ of habeas corpus,
save by the Legislative power in certain
emergencies, seeking in this to rescue per-
sonal liberty from long confinement with
out legal process, in dungeons, towers and
bastiles. They forbade attainders Of in
nocent blood, and cruel and barbarous
punishments, whether by the savage fagot,
or more civilized forms of torture in Luke
iron crown or Damien's bed of STEEL
They prevented the invasion of every
mans house by search-warrants not forti-
fed by oath--each mans dwelling being
his castle. They denounced ignominious
trials for crime without previous indict-
ment, and any abridgment of liberty of
speech, or of the press-tbose great palla-
diums of popular rights-or stripping the
people of the privilege of bearing arms,
and thus exposing their rights to wanton
aggression. All these we're natural rights,
carefully guarded, and SO long as men were
entitled to the character Of freemen, not
likely to be molested. They were rights
inestimable to freemen, and formidable to
tyrants only. They embodied principles
familiar to our ancestors long before the
revolution, the practical working of which
produced the revolution, and eventually a
written constitution, that so zealously
guarded these rights. Chancellor Kent,
in his admirable commentaries, alluding
to these very rights, says:
cit requires more than ordinary hardi-
hood and audacity of character to trample
down principles which our ancestors culti-
waited with reverence, which we imbibed
in our early education which recommend
themselves to the judgment of the world
by their truth and simplicity, and which
are constantly placed before the eyes of
the people, accompanied with the impos-
ing force and solemnity Of constitutional
sanction. There are certain rights which
ought never arbitrarily to be intcrfered
with. Among these are the liberty Of per-
son, of speech, and of the press"
Now, under the baldest preteuce of an
oyer-ruling necessity, all these rights have
been struck down at blow: We might
allude to each of these violations in detail,
but space will not permit. They are all
familiar to the public, and the work has
been bone by those who stand before the
world as pre-eminently defenders Of CON
stitutional rights. Pretended friends Of
the Constitution, they are striving to in
augurate principles, which, if they pre-
vail, may prostrate the Constitution and
erect upon its ruins despotism. Let us
diligently keep in remembrance, that our,
Constitution was formal declaration. of
principles held true and just The Con-
stitution created no principle. The prin-l
ciples thus enunciated still live. Not all
the horrors Of civil war can extinguish
them. Nothing has been added to them,
nothing takenraway, nothing has weaken
ed them since our Constitution was form-
ed. It's q dangerous admission to make,
that this war cannot be carried On, with
out violating and trampling under foot
these principles. Ifitis a war for the
preservation Of the. Constitution, as they
assert, is it any VI der that all Christen-
dom over the watdris astonished to find
that the men who carry it on, are day by
day proving themselves its bitterest foes |?