d it difficult to conceive.
And that difficulty is enhanced, not relieved, by a careful study of the
opinions of the Court. For in those opinions it is assumed that on its
face the law is unconstitutional, and the Court devotes all its
intellectual energies to an attempt to show that the authorities cited
in opposition are exceptional. That the law and the Constitution are not
inconsistent is, however, established both by a consideration of the
object and intent of the Constitutional provision and by judicial
decisions interpreting it. To these two considerations we now direct the
attention of the reader.

The provision in the federal Constitution that "no person shall be ...
deprived of life, liberty, or property, except by due process of law"
(Fifth Amendment), and the provision, "nor shall any state deprive any
person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law"
(Fourteenth Amendment), are derived from the Great Charter wrested from
King John by the Barons in 1215. "No freeman shall be taken or
imprisoned, or disseized, or outlawed, or banished, or any ways
destroyed, nor will we pass upon him, nor will we send upon him, unless
by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land." This is
perhaps the most important of those general clauses in the Great Charter
which, says Hallam in his "History of the Middle Ages," "protect the
personal liberty and property of all freemen by giving security from
arbitrary imprisonment and arbitrary spoliation." Hume gives some
intimation of the abuses that led to this provision: merchants had been
subjected to arbitrary tolls and impositions; the property of the dying
had been seized and their lawful heirs dispossessed; officers of the
Crown had levied on horses and carts in time of peace for their own or
the public service. Green, in his "History of the English People," gives
the picture of John's despotism and of the growing spirit of liberty in
the English common people with greater detail The King's exactions drove
the Barons into alliance with the people. "Illegal exactions, the
seizure of their castles, the preference shown to foreigners, were small
provocations compared with his attacks on the honor of their wives and
daughters." The demand of the common people to substitute due process of
law for wager by battle, and to be secure in their lives, their
liberties, and their property from acts of lawless and irresponsible
power, the Barons made their own,