Our constitution, as the present generation has always been taught, yearns towards liberty and the rights of man. The trial by jury, in the important cases of life, liberty, and property, is essential to these rights. The two, therefore, have such close affinity for each other, as to render it highly probable, if not morally certain, that the framers of the former would make provision for the latter; that they would lay hold of it, as by a law of instinct, to carry out their beneficent purposes. The trial by jury was necessary to the vitality of the constitution; and, I think, it would not be too strong an expression to say that the constitution, as it came from the hands of its founders, necessitated the trial by jury. The object for which the constitution was framed, as set forth in its preamble,--namely, to “establish justice,” “promote the general welfare,” and “secure the blessings of liberty,” to the people,--could never be accomplished without the trial by jury. The preamble is not appealed to as a source of power; but it touches, as by the finger, the objects which it contemplated; it suggests the means by which its beneficent purposes were to be fulfilled, and it indicates the rules of interpretation by which all its provisions are to be expounded. And not only the objects for which the constitution professes to exist, but historical facts from the time of Magna Charta, and before that time; the practice of the English and of our Colonial and Provincial courts before the revolution and during the confederacy;--in fine, all analogies and tendencies of constitutional law, and whatever belongs to ideas of freedom, conspire to force the expectation upon us, that, in a matter of such vast concernment as the life-long liberty or bondage of a man and his offspring, it has _not_ left us without the right of trial by jury. The very first law “for the general good of the colony of New Plymouth,” (1623,) was, “that all criminal acts, and also all matters of _trespasses_ and DEBTS, between man and man, should be tried by the verdict of twelve honest men.” In that fearful array of crimes which the Declaration of Independence charges home upon the king of Great Britain, that sublime instrument enumerates the following as among the most flagitious: “For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury,” and “for protecting his troops, _by a mock trial_, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states.” According to Blackstone, the right to a trial by jury had been held, “time out of mind,” to be the birthright of Englishmen. The 29th chapter of the Great Charter guarantied this right, not only in cases of liberty, life, and limb, but in cases of property, real and personal. In England, it has become a traditional saying, and drops from the common tongue, that the great object of king, lords, and commons, is to get twelve men into the jury box.