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It would be interesting to trace the varying uses of these terms in our forty-eight state constitutions, but that must be left for some other occasion. A majority of the state constitutions, including most of the recent constitutions, now contain the term "due process of law." As that term is the one used in the fourteenth amendment, which is applicable to all the states, it might be preferable, for the sake of uniformity and certainty, to adopt that form as less likely to confuse. Moreover, the phrase "due process of law" lends itself readily to a more comprehensive and inclusive definition if we define the word "due" to mean just and appropriate and the word "process" to mean substantive provision as well as procedure.

Finally, it may be of interest to notice the sanction and security devised for enforcing the covenants of Magna Carta. A body or tribunal of twenty-five barons, called executors, was created by chapter sixty-one, who were to "be bound with all their might, to observe and hold, and cause to be observed, the peace and liberties we have granted and confirmed to them," and who were to have power to compel the king himself, even by force, to keep the promises he had made. The clause providing this security or legal sanction was crude, but it was not necessarily an impracticable innovation. Although the plan utterly failed, it remained of immense value in principle. That principle established the right of the subjects to compel the king of England to obey a body of fixed laws outside and beyond his will; it justified revolution for just cause, and it inspired our forefathers in their struggle against George III. The influence of this idea upon public sentiment as justifying revolution, particularly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, cannot well be over-estimated. The ineffectiveness of this provision of Magna Carta served also to demonstrate the futility of such a tribunal and security, and to lead the English people to look thereafter solely to the courts of justice and to parliament for the protection of their rights and liberties. The founders of our own republican governments may have been warned by the failure of this sanction that it would be unwise to create any political body with power to enforce constitutional provisions, and it may have been for this reason that they left the enforcement of constitutional limitations and the protection of the individual and minorities to an independent non-political forum composed of impartial judges learned in the law and meaning "to observe it well," according to the spirit of Magna Carta.