Further, it is of vital importance to bear in mind the exact nature of the provisions confirmed or declared. A re-statement of some of the more recent reforms of Henry II. (or of those of Archbishop Hubert Walter, following in his footsteps) leads logically to progress rather than to mere stability; while the professed confirmation of Anglo-Saxon usages or of ancient feudal customs, fast disappearing under the new _régime_, implies retrogression rather than standing still. Chapters 34 and 39 of Magna Carta, for example, are of this latter kind. They really demand a return to the system in vogue prior to the innovations of Henry II. when they declare in favour of feudal jurisdictions. Thus, some of the provisions of the Great Charter which, at a casual glance, appear to be correctly described as declaratory, are, in reality, innovations; while others tend towards reaction. III. _Provisions classified according to the estates of the community in whose favour they were conceived._ This third principle of arrangement would stand condemned as completely misleading, if it were necessary to accept as true, in any literal sense, the assertions so frequently made concerning the absolute equality of all classes and interests before the law—as that law was embodied in Magna Carta. Here, then, we are face to face with a fundamental question of immense importance: Does the Great Charter really, as the orthodox traditional view so vehemently asserts, protect the rights of the whole mass of humble Englishmen equally with those of the proudest noble? Is it really a great bulwark of the constitutional liberties of the nation, considered as a nation, in any broad sense of that word? Or is it rather, in the main, a series of concessions to feudal selfishness wrung from the King by a handful of powerful aristocrats? On such questions, learned opinion is sharply divided, although an overwhelming majority of authorities range themselves on the popular side, from Coke (who assumes in every page of his _Second Institute_ that the rights won in 1215 were as valuable for the villein as for the baron) down to writers of the present day. Lord Chatham in one of his great orations[199] insisted that the barons who wrested the Charter from John established claims to the gratitude of posterity because they “did not confine it to themselves alone, but delivered it as a common blessing to the whole people”; and Sir Edward Creasy,[200] in citing Chatham’s words with approval, caps them with more ecstatic words of his own, declaring that one effect of the Charter was “to give and to guarantee full protection for property and person to every human being that breathes English air.” Lord Chatham indeed spoke with the unrestrained enthusiasm of an orator; yet staid lawyers and historians like Blackstone and Hallam seem to vie with him in similar expressions. “An equal distribution of civil rights to all classes of freemen forms