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The rights contained in the Great Charter have been frontally challenged by scornful tyrants and zealots down through the centuries, requiring courage in foreign wars as well as in domestic turmoil. They have too often been neglected or brazenly violated at home, especially on matters of race. But it has always been possible to challenge our governments to live up to their ideals and, with much misery and heartache, that challenge has so far always been successful.

It’s such an amazing story that if we didn’t know it had happened we’d find it hard to believe. As fiction it would not be credible. But it did happen, in a tale full of preposterous villains like King John and James I, heroes like Alfred the Great, Stephen Langton and Edward Coke, and one victory after another snatched from the jaws of defeat.

It is our story too. Consider the tale of Joseph Howe, charged with libelling the colonial administration in Nova Scotia where he would later be a father of self-government. Urging the jury to acquit him by exercising popular sovereignty and striking down the British law saying truth was no defence in libel cases, he asked: “Will you permit the sacred fire of liberty brought by your fathers from the venerable temples of Britain, to be quenched and trodden out on the simple altars they have raised?” The answer was a ringing “No” then, as it must be today and tomorrow and next year and next century.

It’s amazing that Magna Carta could even come into existence and that it could have survived and flourished over all those centuries, so that former British prime minister Winston Churchill could write in 1956 that: “‘The facts embodied in it (Magna Carta) and the circumstances giving rise to them were buried or misunderstood. The underlying idea of the sovereignty of the law, long existent in feudal custom, was raised by it into a doctrine for the national State. And when in subsequent ages the State, swollen with its own authority, has attempted to ride roughshod over the rights or liberties of the subject it is to this doctrine that appeal has again and again been made, and never as yet, without success.”