Repeatedly from the seventeenth century to our own day legislation has been criticized in Great Britain and Ireland on the ground that it was in conflict with Magna Carta, and always the strongest and most effective argument against proposed legislation has been that it would violate the principles of the Great Charter of Liberties. During the past thirty years thoughtful observers of English politics have remarked that private property in England is, on the whole, less secure from attack on the part of the government in our day than it was at the time of the Stuarts. Whenever the increase of class legislation and attacks on private property shall lead Englishmen to place checks and restraints upon the power of temporary majorities, so as more effectively to protect personal and property rights--an event which, I believe, must inevitably come to pass sooner or later--then the stirring battle-cry will again be Magna Carta, and the result may be a return to the spirit of the declarations of Magna Carta and of the statute of Edward III., that any statute contrary to the law of the land guaranteeing the fundamental rights and liberties of the individual shall be void and null and holden for none. And to make that ancient, sound and honest principle really an effective protection to the individual and to minorities, the courts of justice of England may at last be empowered, as they are with us, to refuse to give force and effect and to hold for none any statute in conflict with the fundamental law of the land. Of an importance no less vital than the idea of a permanent law of the land safeguarding the fundamental rights and liberties of the individual, was the express declaration in the first chapter of Magna Carta that the English church, _Anglicana ecclesia_, should be free from interference on the part of the crown and that her rights should be entire and her liberties inviolable. In this provision we have the germ of an independent church and the idea of the separation of Church and State.