A question which involves not only the principles of morality but the fundamental principles of our liberties, must be referred for its final decision to no meaner tribunal than that of the entire people. That people is the only tribunal competent to decide a question so vital as this, which affects every individual in the nation, and must colour the whole of the future internal policy of England. In retaining or rejecting these Acts we have now to determine whether our Constitution shall stand as it has stood hitherto, or whether it shall be changed. This question can only be determined by that power in whose hands the Constitution is ultimately vested. The determination of this momentous question will involve also the fate of all that legislation the tendency of which, during the last century, has been gradually to weaken the Constitution through the insidious rejection in a large number of cases of that great safeguard of our liberties, Jury Trial. Had not the way been paved for such arbitrary Acts as those which we oppose, by the innovations which our great constitutional lawyers have so deplored, it would have been impossible for Parliament to have escaped arousing the alarm of the people when it proposed this present wholesale breach of the great principles of English jurisprudence. But the present Acts have opened our eyes to the nature and tendency of those encroachments which have long been silently going on among us, and we now see it to be a strong argument against such encroachments that they should have culminated in such an invasion of our rights. Men will carelessly tolerate for a long time encroachments in cases of little moment, if these encroachments tend towards the ease and expedition of justice; but when they find that under colour of that ease or expedition, men prompted by selfishness and fear, have made a law which hands over a vast multitude of the people into the power of the lowest of the executive, the real worth of our country begins to appear, and rather than tolerate such an evil they will abolish that whole system, so far as it relates to criminal cases, if that system can successfully be pleaded as an excuse for such treachery on the part of our rulers.[100]