=Civil Rights were Won by Hard Struggles.=—Now these rights did not descend upon mankind like manna from the skies. They were gained for the people by prolonged struggles extending over many centuries. Thousands of men, at various times in history, gave their lives in order that these rights might be established. If you were writing a history of civil liberty among English-speaking people, you would have to go back at least seven hundred years to the days of Magna Carta, when King John of England was forced to surrender in that famous document many of the arbitrary powers which he had claimed the right to exercise. There, on the historic field of Runnymede, the sullen king promised among other things that no free man should be imprisoned or fined or outlawed or otherwise penalized “save by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land”. The winning of the Great Charter was merely the first encounter in a long series of conflicts between the kings and the people of England. Step by step the people wrested from the Crown the right to control taxation, to punish royal officials for wrong-doing, to be supreme in the making of laws, and even to change their entire form of government should they so desire. It was a long and grim struggle, hard-fought all the way. “Lance and torch and tumult, steel and grey-goose wing Wrenched it, inch and ell and all, slowly from the King”. [Sidenote: The beginnings of civil liberty in America.] The men who founded the American colonies brought these rights across the Atlantic with them. In the new soil civic liberty grew and nourished even better than in the old, so much so that Englishmen at home soon became concerned over the strong emphasis which the colonies were placing upon the civil rights of the individual. The gap between the colonies and Great Britain steadily widened in this respect,—leading in the end to the Declaration of Independence, which asserted the civil rights of men to be natural and inalienable. When independence had been established, after a long and difficult struggle, it is not surprising that the people of the thirteen states should decide to write the principles of civil liberty into their new state constitutions. They took this means of demonstrating their conviction that the fundamental rights of the citizen ought to be inscribed in a solemn document beyond the power of legislatures to change. It would be absurd to think, however, that civil liberty exists in the United States merely because a list of civil rights is written into the constitutions of the states and the nation. In the last analysis civil rights depend for their maintenance and enforcement upon a realization of their value by the whole people and the willingness of every citizen to grant to others the rights which he claims for himself. [Sidenote: Citizenship and allegiance.]