Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 4.djvu/399

MEANING OF THE TERM LIBERTY:' 383 have seen that the clauses in question are generally contained in such a section), declares, among other things, that ** no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law." This amendment, like most of the others, was aimed at the federal government only, and the writer has been unable to find a judicial construction of it which throws any Hght on the present question. The first section of the fourteenth amendment provides that All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of the citizens of the United States ; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person, within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. The amendments to the Federal Constitution constitute its bill of rights. The fourteenth amendment was the second of a series of three, the purpose of which was to secure to a recently emanci- pated race all the civil rights that the whole people enjoy, and to give it the protection of the general government in the enjoyment of such rights whenever they should be denied by the States or their agents. It did not add anything to the rights of one citizen against another citizen. Such rights were left to the legislation of the States.^ The second clause of the amendment is, like corre- sponding clauses in the State constitutions, taken from Magna Charta, and there is no reason why it should receive a different interpretation. The first decision to put a construction on the fourteenth amendment was that in the Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36. In 1869 the Legislature of Louisiana created a corporation called the Slaughter-House Company, which was empowered to maintain stock landings and slaughter-houses at a specified place near New Orleans, and all cattle brought to New Orleans for food were required to be kept and slaughtered at these houses, the company being authorized to demand a com- pensation for the use thereof The exclusive privilege thus conferred was to continue for twenty-five years. Certain persons 1 " It simply furnishes an additional security against any encroachment by the States upon the fundamental rights which belong to every citizen as a member of society." U. S. V. Cruikshank, 92 U. S. 354.