the Reconstruction Period, here roughly fixed between the Emancipation Proclamation, January i, 1863, and 1883, when the Civil Rights Bill of 1875 was declared unconstitutional.¹²

The Thirteenth Amendment is clear enough. It abolished slavery. There has been no return to this institution unless peonage for debt in the South may be so called. It freed the Negro, and left him just there. The Fourteenth Amendment is the effort to assure his political freedom by forbidding States to pass laws limiting his civil rights. It took the Fifteenth Amendment to give him the right to vote.¹³

THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT

The Fourteenth Amendment is of prime importance to civil liberty. “Fairly considered, these amendments may be said to rise to the dignity of a new Magna Carta.” Thus speaks Justice Swayne of the United States Supreme Court. A commentator adds: “The Fourteenth Amendment nationalized the whole sphere of civil liberty…. Our Constitutional history during years (to 1898) with comparatively few exceptions may be said to be but little more than a commentary on the Fourteenth Amendment.”¹⁴

The guarantee of life, liberty, and property under the law should indeed be a new magna carta, but the Supreme Court has not so interpreted it save as it affects property. Its protection was in law extended to all who came within the rule, not limiting it to the negroes who had occasioned it.

But the Supreme Court has not interpreted it in the interest of civil liberty. The principal report of the Federal Commission on Industrial Relations (1915) says:

We are informed by counsel who have examined the cases involved that the fourteenth amendment has had no appreciable effect in protecting personal rights. According to the existing decisions, the due-process clause does not guarantee the right of trial by jury, nor does it necessitate indictment by grand juries, nor has it restrained arbitrary arrests and imprisonments on the part of the State governments when men are kidnapped in one State

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