Hume calls the trial by jury "An institution admirable in itself, and the best calculated for the preservation of liberty and the administration of justice, that ever was devised by the wit of man."[113] An old book, called "English Liberties," says: "English Parliaments have all along been most zealous for preserving this great Jewel of Liberty, trials by juries having no less than fifty-eight several times, since the Norman Conquest, been established and confirmed by the legislative power, no one privilege besides having been ever so often remembered in parliament."[114] [Footnote 106: _Mackintosh's Hist. of Eng._, ch. 3. _45 Lardner's Cab. Cyc._, 354.] [Footnote 107: "_Forty shilling freeholders_" were those "people dwelling and resident in the same counties, whereof every one of them shall have free land or tenement to the value of forty shillings by the year at the least above all charges." By statute _8 Henry_ 6, ch. 7, (1429,) these freeholders only were allowed to vote for members of Parliament from the _counties_.] [Footnote 108: He probably speaks in its favor only to blind the eyes of the people to the frauds he has attempted upon its true meaning.] [Footnote 109: It will be noticed that Coke calls these confirmations of the charter "acts of parliament," instead of acts of the king alone. This needs explanation. It was one of Coke's ridiculous pretences, that laws anciently enacted by the king, at the request, or with the consent, or by the advice, of his parliament, was "an act of parliament," instead of the act of the king. And in the extracts cited, he carries this idea so far as to pretend that the various confirmations of the Great Charter were "acts of parliament," instead of the acts of the kings. He might as well have pretended that the original grant of the Charter was an "act of parliament;" because it was not only granted at the request, and with the consent, and by the advice, but on the compulsion even, of those who commonly constituted his parliaments. Yet this did not make the grant of the charter "an act of parliament." It was simply an act of the king. The object of Coke, in this pretence, was to furnish some color for the palpable falsehood that the legislative authority, which parliament was trying to assume in his own day, and which it finally succeeded in obtaining, had a precedent in the ancient constitution of the kingdom. There would be as much reason in saying that, because the ancient kings were in the habit of passing laws in special answer to the _petitions_ of their subjects, therefore those _petitioners_ were a part of the legislative power of the kingdom.