The Birth-Rights of Englishmen and Macdonald's Constitutional Liberty

Macdonald's "constitutional liberty" had to refer to the kind of liberty embodied in the British constitution ("our constitution," as he called it). And in fact, it was on these principles that the British North America Act of 1867 was established. To understand the founding principles of the British constitution (and therefore Macdonald's thinking), one has to go back to Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, published from 1765 to 1769... Blackstone opened his Commentaries by discussing the absolute rights of the British subjects on which the British constitution rested. These "absolute rights" (also referred to as Englishmen's "birth-rights" by Jean-Louis de Lolme in his Constitution d'Angleterre published in 1771) were reduced "to three principal or primary articles; the right of personal security, the right of personal liberty, and the right of private property...."

--Michel Ducharme, "Macdonald and the Concept of Liberty," in Macdonald at 200: New Reflections and Legacies, ed. Patrice Dutil and Roger Hall (Toronto: Dundurn, 2014), 150.