The Discovery of Freedom by Rose Wilder Lane

Author:Rose Wilder Lane
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Publisher: The John Day Company
Published: 2012-06-18T10:11:02+00:00

IV. The English Liberties

ONLY the English kept the values of the feudal system. On their sea-guarded island, apart from Europe, the English barons successfully resisted the Kings.

King Henry the Second first attacked the feudal system in England, so sensibly that he almost destroyed it. He attacked its justice.

Justice is a moral problem that men have hardly begun to solve. It comes from the necessity to act in accordance with facts. Men have always known that there are facts in the nature of things, to which human beings must conform. (There is gravitation; better not walk off a cliff. There is human brotherhood; better love thy neighbor as thyself). So in all times they have doubted that one man is able to judge another. Justice is always felt to be a standard not made by men.

Pagans obey the whims of gods, as explained by their priests. Democratic Athenians believed that justice is the will of a majority, on the theory that ninety men are right and ten are wrong. Using this theory, they killed off their intelligent and honest men. Pontius Pilate also obeyed a majority, though more skeptically.

Roman law protected Roman citizens (not Roman subjects). So when a chief of police carelessly told his men to torture St. Paul, the prisoner had only to say, "I am a Roman citizen," to bring the chief himself abjectly apologizing. "I am a citizen, too," the chief said, as a fraternity brother, but he had to brag that he was rich: "With a great price, obtained I this freedom." His prisoner was still coldly superior; St. Paul replied, "I was born free."

By "freedom" they meant that no man in Roman government could torture and kill them just because he took a notion. The Gestapo was only for Roman subjects. A citizen, St. Paul could appeal to Roman law; and it executed him because he did not worship pagan gods.

The feudal Europeans left justice to the elements, to fire and water. Bind an accused man and throw him into deep water; if he drowns, he is innocent; if he does not drown, he is guilty. ("Born to be hanged, you'll never be drowned.") That was the ordeal by water; the ordeal by fire worked on the same principle. For knights, there was the ordeal by combat; God gives success to the right. That is true, as every scientist knows, and every man who ever adjusted a carburetor. But feudal Europeans, like pagan Greeks, imagined that God personally controlled the spears and swords (as today they might imagine that God's invisible hand adjusts the carburetor) and those trials by combat caused sceptics to say, "Might makes Right."

King Henry the Second took advantage of this scepticism. His grandfather had invented Circuit Courts: King Henry established them, and invented juries. He published through his realm the news that any man who demanded the King's Justice would be tried before a judge, and his case would be decided by twelve men of his own social class (his peers).

Innocent or guilty, would you rather face a feudal ordeal, or judge and jury? Exactly.

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