rather inconstant guardian, however, for its fluctuating membership
tipped the scales now in favor of Business, now in favor of Government.
And today the latter tendency appears to have prevailed. In its
decisions early in 1937 sustaining outstanding Roosevelt Administration
measures, the Court not only subordinated the freedom of employers to
contract to the freedom of employees to organize, but intimated broadly
that liberty in some of its phases is much more dependent upon
legislative implementation that upon judicial protection.[72]

In contrast to this withdrawal, however, has been the Court's projection
of another segment of "liberty" into new territory. In Gitlow _v._ New
York,[73] decided in 1925, even in sustaining an antisyndicalist
statute, the Court adopted _arguendo_ the proposition which it had
previously rejected, that "liberty" in Amendment XIV renders available
against the States the restraints which Amendment I imposes on Congress.
For fifteen years little happened. Then in 1940, the Court supplemented
its ruling in the Gitlow Case with the so-called "Clear and Present
Danger" rule, an expedient which was designed to divest state enactments
restrictive of freedom of speech, of press, of religion, and so forth,
of their presumed validity, just as, earlier, statutes restrictive of
freedom of contract had been similarly disabled. By certain of the
Justices, this result was held to be required by "the preferred
position" of some of these freedoms in the hierarchy of constitutional
values; an idea to which certain other Justices demurred. The result to
date has been a series of holdings the net product of which for our
Constitutional Law is at this juncture difficult to estimate; and the
recent decision in Dennis _v._ United States under Amendment I augments
the difficulty.[74]

A passing glance will suffice for the operation of the due process