It is not only however in the Act itself alone that we see this indifference to the interests of the poor and unprotected, whose sole protection under heaven lies in that constitution which this law has violated, but also in the carrying out of this law by the Admiralty and War Office, whom in place of the constitution which it has set aside it has erected as the guardians of the weak. By these tender guardians of the weak, we find an actual crusade carried on under this law against the defenceless. In the directions given at various times to the police, they are enjoined to keep an especial eye on the proceedings of “milliners, shop-girls, domestic servants,” and the like. It is said that the beginning of strife is like the letting out of water: it is a process which when once begun is not so easily ended, and those who have opened the torrent cannot say where it will cease. The same may justly be said of the admission of a false principle into legislation, and when the barriers of constitutional safeguards are swept away by Act of Parliament, nothing can stem the torrent of illegality and oppression which will follow. I shall speak more hereafter of this consequence, and only here observe how the overreaching of a bad law is the necessary consequence of its own vicious nature. We have been reproached for making this question a class question. We accept the reproach, if reproach it be; because we say that it is a question for the poor rather than for the rich. It was not we who initiated this distinction, but the majority of the upper classes soon taught us that they considered it no question of theirs. They told us plainly that the subject was too unpleasant to be treated as one of public interest; but while with this plea they endeavoured to silence us, we found that they generally lent the weight of their influence, and not always apathetically or ignorantly, to the promotion of this legislation. To them this legislation involved no present and immediate diminution of freedom for themselves, and they seem to have been blindly ignorant or selfishly forgetful that their children and children’s children would be, as well as the children of the poor, inheritors of the fatal consequences of violated liberties; and that the chains which they now weave for others will in time entangle themselves. But when we turned to the humbler classes, we found that they knew that it _is_ a question for them; and that they, more intelligent in this than the upper classes, knew that it was also a question for this whole country of England, whose political liberty depends on the preservation of the rights of all. “The trial by jury ever has been,” says Blackstone,[33] “and I trust ever will be, looked upon as the glory of the English law.... It is the most transcendent privilege that any subject can enjoy, or wish for, that he cannot be affected in his property, his liberty, or his person, but by the unanimous consent of twelve of his