In the New York Criminal Court House.
This mural decoration is placed above the pen in which the prisoners are kept. Equality, holding a globe and compasses, displays a sternness and rigor which Fraternity, with a kindly grip of the arm, is seeking to soften. Liberty, to the right, has broken the chain which held him down, in spirit as well as in body. These three words, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, formed the motto of the French Revolution, and they have been the slogan of militant democracy ever since.
This civil liberty, as it exists in the United States, includes the following rights:
The general rights of citizens.
1. To travel freely from place to place on any lawful errand, and everywhere to be accorded the equal protection of the laws. The citizen of New York who goes to California is not an alien there. He is entitled to all the privileges which belong to an American citizen.
2. To own property, make contracts, and engage in any lawful trade or labor.
3. To enjoy freedom of worship, freedom of speech, and freedom from arbitrary arrest.
4. To have a fair trial when accused of any crime; to be protected in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property, and not to be deprived of them without due process of law.
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[was] a long and grim struggle, hard-fought all the way.