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, and by the same act claimed for others what they claimed for themselves.  “The under tenants were protected against all exactions of their lords in precisely the same terms as they were protected against the lawless exactions of the Crown.”

From such a provision for the protection of the fundamental rights of person and property it is a far cry to the conclusion that the people cannot remedy the injustice which inflicts all the consequences of accidents which occur in extrahazardous trades upon the individual who, in practicing that trade, happens to be subjected to the peril.  Common sense, as well as frequent decisions of the courts, sustain Daniel Webster’s definition of the scope of the Constitutional provision embodying in our law this provision of the Great Charter:  “The meaning is that every citizen shall hold his life, liberty, and property and immunities under the protection of general rules which govern society.”  That society can never make new rules for the better protection of life, liberty, and property and immunities, is a doctrine as repugnant to reason as it is to social progress.  It is equally repugnant to the principle of interpretation laid down by the Supreme Court of the United States:  “The law is perfectly well settled that the first ten amendments to the Constitution, commonly known as the Bill of Rights, were not intended to lay down any novel principles of government, but simply to embody certain guarantees and immunities which we had inherited from our English ancestors."[77] And it seems never even to have occurred