no one had made it as familiar as it has now become in the classic pages of Professor Dicey. But Hallam was perfectly well aware that these securities for the liberty of the subject were often abused, that the sheriffs who empanelled the jury were often corrupt and the judges who directed it were not infrequently servile; also that so long as the Star Chamber existed no jury could venture to give a verdict of "not guilty" in a prosecution by the crown without running the risk of being heavily punished. He is not insensible to these abuses and to the length of time it took to correct them, as the reader of the following pages will discover for himself, and he attaches due weight to the constitutional importance of the Act for the Abolition of the Star Chamber. But the truth of his main contention (as expressed in his chapter on "The English Constitution" in an earlier work[2]), that what chiefly distinguished our constitution from that of other countries was the "security for personal freedom and property" enjoyed by the subject, is undeniable. It was not so much the possession of representative institutions as the enjoyment of equal rights at common law that constituted the Englishman's advantage. Maitland[3] has recently pointed this out in language almost identical with that of Hallam when he insists that "Parliaments" or "Estates" were in no way peculiar to England; every country in Western Europe possessed them in the Middle Ages, but what those countries did not possess was a great school of law like the Inns of Court determined to uphold at all costs the claims of the customary law of the nation against the despotic doctrines of the civil law of Rome. Hallam's attitude towards the constitution was that of Burke--he regarded it with a veneration little short of superstition. He has expressed himself in his earlier works in words which can hardly fail to provoke a smile to-day:--