But it is in the administration of justice, or of law, that the freedom or subjection of a people is tested. If this administration be in accordance with the arbitrary will of the legislator that is, if his will, as it appears in his statutes, be the highest rule of decision known to the judicial tribunals, the government is a despotism, and the people are slaves. If, on the other hand, the rule of decision be these principles of natural equity and justice, which constitute, or at least are embodied in, the general conscience of mankind, the people are free in just so far as that conscience is enlightened. That the authority of the king was of little weight with the judicial tribunals, must necessarily be inferred from the fact already stated, that his authority over the people was but weak. If the authority of his laws had been paramount in the judicial tribunals, it would have been paramount with the people, of course; because they would have had no alternative but submission. The fact, then, that his laws were not authoritative with the people, is proof that they were not authoritative with the tribunals in other words, that they were not, as matter of course, enforced by the tribunals. But we have additional evidence that, up to the time of Magna Carta, the laws of the king were not binding upon the judicial tribunals; and if they were not binding before that time, they certainly were not afterwards, as has already been shown from Magna Carta itself. It is manifest from all the accounts we have of the courts in which juries sat, prior to Magna Carta, such as the court-baron, the hundred court, the court-leet, and the county court, that they were mere courts of conscience, and that the juries were the judges, deciding causes according to their own notions of equity, and not according to any laws of the king, unless they thought them just.