Selected Works of Josephine Elizabeth Grey Butler & Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew & Katharine C. Bushnell & Julie-Victoire Daubie
9781465554505
418 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The object of the following Essay is to set forth the unconstitutional nature of certain recent Acts of the Legislature, and the danger arising therefrom, with the view of arousing the country to a sense of that danger. The enactments called the Contagious Diseases Acts, passed respectively in 1866, 1868, and 1869, may be regarded from several points of view. With their medical aspect and the statistical consideration of their results on public health, it is not my intention to deal. It has been dwelt on by other people, and in other places, fully. The moral side of the question is undoubtedly the most important, and has been dwelt upon by the religious portion of the community, almost to the exclusion of others, although it may be truly said that it of necessity includes all others. There is, however, one aspect of the question which has not been sufficiently set forth, that is, the constitutional aspect, including the effect which such legislation must have on our social and moral life as a nation, from a political point of view. In almost all the great meetings which have been held throughout the country on the subject of these Acts, resolutions have been passed embodying the word “unconstitutional” as characteristic of the Acts, proving that the mass of the people of England have a strong instinct, if it be nothing more, of what is constitutional and what is not. Few terms, it has been said, are more vaguely or loosely employed than this. It is affirmed with some truth that “Magna Charta is in everybody’s lips but in nobody’s hands.” The careful study of the Acts in question leads me to the conclusion that the latter part of this saying must be eminently true of their framers. We, on the other hand, are charged by our opponents with ignorance of the words which we use. Yet what Sir Edward Creasy says is true, that “the English Constitution is susceptible of a full and accurate explanation;” and though the subject may require “more investigation than may suit hasty talkers and superficial thinkers, it is not more than every member of a great and free State ought gladly to bestow, in order that he may rightly comprehend and appreciate the polity and the laws in which and by which he lives, acts, and has his civic being.” He adds, “The student will recognise and admire in the history, laws, and institutions of England, certain great leading principles which have existed from the earliest periods of our nationality down to the present time. These great primeval and enduring principles are the principles of the English Constitution; and we are not obliged to learn them from imperfect evidence or precarious speculations, for they are imperishably recorded in the Great Charter, and in the charters and statutes connected with and confirmatory of Magna Carta.” It is these enduring principles which are violated by the Contagious Diseases Acts. This I shall shortly show, but before doing so, I shall briefly set forth what these principles are. I am convinced that the people of this country are as yet but very partially awakened to the tremendous issues involved in the controversy before us, considered as a matter of constitutional rights; therefore it is that I venture, though I am no lawyer, to bring before them its extreme importance under that aspect. For this time of agony for the patriot, who can in any degree foresee the future of that country which violates the eternal principles of just government, drives many of us, unlearned though we be, to search the annals of our country, to inquire into past crises of danger, and the motives and character of the champions who fought the battles of liberty, with that keenness and singleness of purpose with which, in the agony of spiritual danger, the wellnigh shipwrecked soul may search the Scriptures of God, believing that in them he has eternal life.
