A most important aspect of the Pilgrims' contribution to our political institutions is the provision for just and equal laws contained in the Mayflower Compact, for, as I have already suggested, in that provision is embodied the essence of our whole constitutional system. It has become a truism that the characteristic of the American system of constitutional government is equality before the law. We Americans accept this doctrine as of course. But we should appreciate that civil equality or equality before the law was practically unknown in Europe when the Mayflower Compact was written. In this country its development sprang in great measure gradually from the seed first sown by the Pilgrims. Neither the phrase "equality before the law," so familiar to us as expressing a fundamental and self-evident truth, nor the term "the equal protection of the laws," now contained in the fourteenth amendment, is to be found in the English common law. Nor was either term, or any equivalent, in legal use in America at the time of the adoption of the Constitution of the United States. Indeed, the phrase "equality before the law" is said to be a modern translation from the French. Nevertheless, equality in duty, in right, in burden and in protection is the thought which has run through all our constitutional enactments from the beginning. The Pilgrim Fathers perceived, long before it was generally appreciated, that equal laws might fall far short of political justice and liberty, and hence they provided for "just and equal laws." They realized, perhaps indistinctly, that equality in itself, without other elements, is not sufficient to guarantee justice, and that, under a law which is merely _equal_, all may be equally oppressed, equally degraded, equally enslaved. They well knew that equality is one of the pervading features of most despotisms, and that a law may be equal and yet be grossly arbitrary, tyrannical and unjust. Obviously, a law confiscating all property of a certain kind would be equal if it applied to all having that particular kind of property. The laws of England then in force providing for one form of worship, "for abolishing diversity of opinions," as the title of the act of 31 Henry VIII. recited, or compelling all to attend the same church and to take the same oath of religious supremacy and the sacraments of the same religious denomination, were all equal laws, because they applied to every one, no matter what his conscience might dictate. In the cabin of the Mayflower, the Pilgrim Fathers seem to have had a vision revealing to them the fundamental and essential political truth that equality is but an attribute of the liberty they were then seeking at the peril of their lives and the sacrifice of their fortunes, and that true liberty requires _just_ as well as _equal_ laws. To repeat, it was the Pilgrims who first sowed in our soil the seed of just and equal laws, and that seed has grown into the fixed rule of the American constitutional