are seen to be recorded; and so far as you find a government to exist, you find the right to petition that government existing also as an undeniable franchise and birthright of the humblest in the land.  The Normans came over, lance in hand, burning and trampling down every thing before them, and cutting off the Saxon dynasty and the Saxon nobles at the edge of the sword; but the right of petition remained untouched.  In all succeeding times, from the day when the barons at Runnymede pledged themselves to deny to no man redress of his grievances, through every vicissitude of revolution and of war, down to the day when our forefathers abandoned their native country, the same right of petition continued without challenge.  In the next reign, it is true, that of the misguided Charles I, the king invaded the public liberties; and he expiated the wrong, as he merited, by a felon’s death.  After the Commonwealth had passed away, came the petition of right, and with it the statute of the 13 Charles II, distinctly recognising the old right of petition, and regulating the mode of its exercise; and again, after the dethronement and exile of James II, the Bill of Rights and the statute of I William and Mary, again recognising and regulating the right of petition as it has been exercised at all times throughout Great Britain.

Now, I ask gentlemen to point me, in all or any of the periods under review, to the precedents of a refusal by Parliament to receive petitions.  I invite them to turn over the histories of parliamentary proceeding, and cite me the examples of petitions being thrust out of the House of Commons or of Lords, at the instant of presentation, on the ground that the prayer of the petition ought not to be granted.  Will they do it?  Can they do it?  Is it not perfectly notorious, on the contrary, that every subject is freely admitted to be heard in his petition, provided it be respectful in terms, even although he pray expressly for a downright revolution in the government, as did the thousands of petitioners who thus carried through, in our own time, the great measure of parliamentary reform?  And shall the People in republican America, with its written constitution for the protection of the public rights, and by a body of strictly limited powers,—­shall the People here be forbidden to do that which they may freely do in the monarchy of England, having no guaranties for the public liberty except laws and prescriptive usages, all of them confessedly at the will of an omnipotent Parliament?  Forbid it, reason!  Forbid it, justice!  Forbid it, liberty!  Forbid it the beatified spirits of the revolutionary sages, who watch in heaven over the destinies of the Republic!

Aye, but, say gentlemen, if such things are not done by the representatives of the People in monarchical England, they have been done by their representatives in democratic America.  We are told of precedents at home.  What are those precedents?

To begin, I throw aside, as wholly inapplicable to the question, or at least as evasive of it, the case of petitions refused on account of disrespectful language towards the persons or the body petitioned.  Those constitute a standing exception, independent of the merits of the subject.