Guizot remarks, in speaking of the success of English revolutions:—“It is not enough that rights should be recognised and promises made, it is further necessary that these rights should be respected, and these promises fulfilled; the last article therefore of the Great Charter is especially intended to provide this guarantee. It is there said that the barons shall elect twenty-five by their own free choice, charged to exercise all vigilance that the provisions of the charter may never fail to be carried into effect. The powers of these twenty-five barons (a kind of vigilance committee) were unlimited.” If the king or his agents allowed themselves to violate the enactments of the charter in the very smallest particular, the barons were to denounce this abuse before the king, and demand that it should be instantly checked. If the king did not accede to their demand, the barons had the right, forty days after the summons had been issued by them, to prosecute the king, to deprive him of all his lands and castles, “the safety of his person, the queen and his children being respected,” until the abuse had been reformed to the satisfaction of the barons and of the whole nation.[101] Any one who reads the History of England may judge for himself of the wisdom of these immortal restraining Statutes called the Petition of Rights and Bill of Rights, which were made necessary by the aggressions and illegal actions of subsequent monarchs. And in less terrible crises than those which called for these great confirmatory charters, it has been invariably the habit of the English people to claim, through Parliament, besides the redress of the wrong committed, some similar wholesome restraining Statute, elucidating and strengthening anew that particular part of the Constitution which may happen to have been imperilled, and securing that similar violations shall not, in future, be attempted with impunity. Among these may be reckoned the famous Habeas Corpus Act, and a multitude of others which it is needless here to recount.