Extravagant estimates of its value will readily occur to anyone acquainted with the literature of the subject. For example, Sir James Mackintosh (_History of England_, I. 218, edn. of 1853) declares that we are “bound to speak with reverential gratitude of the authors of the Great Charter. To have produced it, to have preserved it, to have matured it, constitute the immortal claim of England upon the esteem of mankind. Her Bacons and Shakespeares, her Miltons and Newtons, etc., etc.” Such uncritical eulogy contributes nothing to the understanding of Magna Carta. Nor has this tendency to unthinking adulation been entirely confined to popular writers; judges and institutional authors, even Sir Edward Coke himself, have too often lost the faculty of critical and exact scholarship when confronted with the virtues of the Great Charter. There is scarcely one great principle of the English constitution of the present day, or indeed of any constitution in any day, calculated to secure national liberties, or otherwise to win the esteem of mankind, which has not been read by commentators into the provisions of Magna Carta. In particular, the political leaders of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries discovered among its chapters every important reform which they desired to introduce into England, thereby disguising the revolutionary nature of many of their projects by dressing them in the garb of the past. Many instances of the constitutional principles and institutions, with the origin of which successive commentators have erroneously credited the Great Charter, will be expounded under the appropriate chapters of the sequel. It will be sufficient in the meantime to enumerate trial by jury; the right of every prisoner to obtain a writ of Habeas Corpus; the abolition of all arbitrary imprisonment at the king’s command; the complete prohibition of monopolies; the enunciation of a close and indissoluble tie between taxation and representation; equality of all and sundry before the law; a matured conception of nationality, embracing high and low, freeman and villein alike: all these, and more, have been discovered in various clauses of the Great Charter.[230] ----- Footnote 230: Edmund Burke (_Works_, II. 53, edn. of 1837, Boston) credits Magna Carta with creating the House of Commons! “Magna Charta, if it did not give us originally the House of Commons, gave us at least a House of Commons of weight and consequence.” As will be shown in the sequel, chapter 14 of the Great Charter (the only one bearing on the subject) is in reality of a reactionary nature, confining the right of attendance at the _commune concilium_ to the freeholders of the Crown and departing from the precedent of two years earlier, which introduced representatives of each county.