The Crown

Then, too, punishment for crime falls inevitably within the control of the Crown, or in other words of the Government.

These governmental officials have the power to make regulations for the carrying out of the Act which, if not annulled by the King in Council, become part of the Act itself.

Any regulation indeed must be laid before each House of Parliament for twenty-one days, and may be annulled by the King in Council on a petition that it shall be annulled being presented within that twenty-one days by either House.

These acts gave unlimited authority to the king’s justices to pack juries at their discretion;

It was, in principle, an assertion of a right, on the part of the government, to select the individuals who were to determine the authority of its own laws, and the extent of its own powers.

Their appointment of sheriffs was, therefore, equivalent to an appointment by the king himself.

The Common Law never required that a freeborn Englishman should “humbly petition” the crown for the enjoyment of his natural rights of property;

Is it not nearly an infinite insult, that such men as Arkwright and Watt, who were of ten thousand times more value to mankind than all the kings and queens that time has ever produced, or ever will produce, should be necessitated to hold their natural rights to the products of their own labor, on such terms as these?

An English patent is granted in these supercilious and insolent terms.

Whatever we may think of the king’s new justice, as it stood between six and seven centuries ago, comparing it with all that we have learnt and accomplished since, there is no doubt that it was immensely more rational than the prehistoric methods it supplanted, or that its rapid success was due to its merits.

The king’s overriding power, a power both to devise and to execute, was the only one strong enough for the work.

The broad distinction is that outer doors may not be broken in execution of process at the suit of a private person;