; no tax shall be imposed upon the
property of the United States; nor shall the lands or other property
of non-residents be taxed higher than the lands or other property of
residents."

These specific prohibitions are followed in the same section by
the general limitation which reads: "All the laws of the Governor and
Legislative Assembly shall be submitted to, and if disapproved by, the
Congress of the United States, the same shall be null and of no effect."

The Territorial Bill of Rights as set forth in the Constitution is
exceedingly brief--perhaps the shortest Bill of Rights on record. It
consists of a single sentence and reads as follows: "The inhabitants
of the said Territory shall be entitled to all the rights, privileges
and immunities heretofore granted and secured to the Territory of
Wisconsin and to its inhabitants." On its face this guarantee of the
fundamental rights of man and of the citizen seems vague and
unsatisfactory. But it is, nevertheless, large in implication. If we
turn to the Constitution of the Territory of Wisconsin to see what
rights, privileges, and immunities were therein guaranteed, we find
"that the inhabitants of the said Territory shall be entitled to, and
enjoy, all and singular the rights, privileges, and advantages,
granted and secured to the people of the Territory of the United
States northwest of the river Ohio, by the articles of the compact
contained in the ordinance for the Government of the said Territory,
passed on the thirteenth day of July, one thousand seven hundred and
eighty-seven; and shall be subject to all the conditions and
restrictions and prohibitions in said articles of compact imposed upon
the people of the said Territory." In other words, the provisions of
the Ordinance of 1787 are by implication made a part of the
Constitution of the Territory of Iowa. Thus the people of Iowa
inherited through the Territorial Constitutions of 1836 and 1838 the
political principles of the great Ordinance of 1787 as a Bill of
Rights.

Great was the legacy. Mark the classical expression of that instrument
in enumerating the immemorial rights, privileges, and principles of
Anglo-Saxon polity. "No person demeaning himself in a peaceable and
orderly manner, shall ever be molested on account of his mode of worship
or religious sentiments . . . . The inhabitants of the said Territory
shall always be entitled to the benefits of the writ of _habeas corpus_,
and of the trial by jury;