But this is not a constitution, not a statement of rights; it is a statute-law of the sort then possible, viz: in the form of a royal edict. In each section the king ordains so and so. Nor is it a charter in the interest of the rights of man. The bondsmen, who made the bulk of the population of England at that time, are not included in its benefits, and not mentioned save once, and that exception was doubtless inserted for the benefit of the masters, for it exempts from execution the tools of the slave, which of course belonged to his owner. So much for what the charter is not and does not. A large share of its articles are devoted to defining and regulating the feudal tenure, duties and rights of the barons, and were quite selfish in their scope, although they mark progress as reducing ill-understood relations of king and feudatories for the first time to a written form. But they went further, and stipulated that all these privileges and immunities should apply to all classes of freemen—an important point, as it made Normans and Englishmen equal before the law. Much space is devoted to regulating business and commercial matters; as leasehold rights, treatment of the estates of wards and widows, fixing the widow’s right of dower, freeing of trade, home and foreign, from restrictions and imposts, regulating fisheries, bridge-building, highways, weights and measures. Advancing into the domain of property and personal rights, it fixed the terms and places of courts and opened them freely to all; no man could be tried without witnesses, or detained in prison without trial; borough franchises were declared inviolable. Then came three sections which struck at the heart of the tyrannical practices of John’s reign: Foreign officers, temporal or spiritual, were to be removed and their holdings filled by Englishmen; and mercenary troops were to be removed from the realm. “Justice or right shall not be sold, delayed or denied to any man.” And then came the declaration of civil rights, which has never ceased to echo wherever free institutions aspired to live: “No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or disseized of rights and property, or be outlawed or exiled, or otherwise destroyed but by lawful judgment of his peers or the law of the land.” This grand declaration was five hundred years ahead of the times, and was not made a fact sooner than that; but all the same, it made the condition of “freeman” in England a great prize for the slave to struggle for, and under all the stormy vicissitudes of royal, baronial and clerical oppression of succeeding ages; made the condition of men in England infinitely superior to that of subjects of other realms—in fact, and in the end, made England what she is, America what _she_ is as to free institutions. So, on the whole, those iron-fisted old barons did their work well, according to their light and the condition of their times; and Runnymede has become, by their great act, a shrine of freedom.