376 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. Great Charter; it was insisted upon in all the confirmations of that article, and is there always found in connection with the rights of Hfe and property ; its infringement was the chief com- plaint in the Petition of Right of 1627, and the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 was passed solely to secure it against usurpation. Altogether, it may be said that the history of the growth and development of the right of personal liberty is the main element in the history of early English constitutional law, that the idea of personal liberty pervades the history of the Anglo-Saxon race, and that it is, therefore, not surprising to find it classified with the rights of life and property as one of the three greatest civil
- liberties."
It may, howev'er, be contended that although the term " liberty" is not used in the clauses under discussion in its broadest sense to include all the rights one has in a body politic, it does include other great and important rights besides that of personal liberty, as, for example, rehgious liberty, liberty of speech and of press, liberty to bear arms, of petition and discussion, liberty to obtain justice in the courts, and many others, all of which are to-day regarded as fundamental rights in this country.^ It may be argued, in other words, that the term "Hberty" is a broader one than the terms used in Magna Charta, and may well be interpreted to include other rights besides that of personal freedom, for the reason that it was probably intended so to do by the framers of our constitutions. There are several answers to this argument. In the first place, the clauses in our American constitutions are, as we have seen, mere copies of the thirty-ninth article of Magna Charta, which knows nothing of such rights as the above. In the second place, the term ** Hberty," while it was not used in the thirty-ninth article, was used in its present connection with the terms **life" and "property", long before the framing of our American constitutions, and when so used meant simply per- sonal Hberty. It would, therefore, naturally be used by the framers of our constitutions in that sense. To establish this it is only necessary to refer to Blackstone. In one place Black- stone remarks: **The Great Charter protected every individual of the nation in the free enjoyment of his life, liberty, and 1 See Judge Cooley's discussion of the fourteenth amendment in the appendix of his edition of Story on the Constitution. See also his discussion of " Civil Rights " in the
- Principles of Constitutional Law.'*
