in Paul v. Virginia, 8 Wall. 168, 180, considering the operation and effect of Article IV, § 2, of the Constitution, it was said:

"It was undoubtedly the object of the clause in question to place the citizens of each State upon the same footing with citizens of other States, so far as the advantages resulting from citizenship in those States are concerned. It relieves them from the disabilities of alienage in other States; it inhibits discriminating legislation against them by other States; it gives them the right of free ingress into other States, and egress from them; it insures to them in other States the same freedom possessed by the citizens of those States in the acquisition and enjoyment of property and in the pursuit of happiness; and it secures to them in other States the equal protection of their laws. It has been justly said that no provision in the Constitution has tended so strongly to constitute the citizens of the United States one people as this.

"Indeed, without some provision of the kind removing from the citizens of each State the disabilities of alienage in the other States, and giving them equality of privileges with citizens of those States, the Republic would have constituted little more than a league of States; it would not have constituted the Union which now exists."

Again, in Ward v. Maryland, 12 Wall. 418, 430, upon the same subject, the court declared:

"Attempt will not be made to define the words 'privileges and immunities,' or to specify the rights which they are intended to secure and protect, beyond what may be necessary to the decision of the case before the court. Beyond doubt those words are words of very comprehensive meaning, but it will be sufficient to say that the clause plainly and unmistakably secures and protects the right of a citizen of one State to pass into any other State of the Union for the purpose of engaging in lawful commerce, trade, or business without molestation; to acquire per

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sonal property; to take and hold real estate; to maintain actions in the courts of the State; and to be exempt from any higher taxes or excises than are imposed by the State upon its own citizens."

In the Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36, 75-76, the court, after reciting both the provisions of Article IV of the Articles of Confederation and Article IV, § 2, of the Constitution, said:

"There can be but little question that the purpose of both these provisions is the same, and that the privileges and immunities intended are the same in each. In the article of the Confederation we have some of these specifically mentioned, and enough perhaps to give some general idea of the class of civil rights meant by the phrase.

"Fortunately we are not without judicial construction of this clause of the Constitution. The first and the leading case on the subject is that of Corfield v. Coryell, decided by Mr. Justice Washington in the Circuit Court for the District of Pennsylvania in 1823.

"The inquiry,' he says 'is, what are the privileges and immunities of citizens of the several States? We feel no hesitation in confining these expressions to those privileges and immunities which are fundamental; which belong of right to the citizens of all free governments, and which have at all times been enjoyed by citizens of the several States which compose this Union, from the time of their becoming free, independent, and sovereign. What these fundamental principles are, it would be more tedious than difficult to enumerate. They may all, however, be comprehended under the following general heads: protection by the government, with the right to acquire and possess property of every kind, and to pursue and obtain happiness and safety, subject, nevertheless, to such restraints as the government may prescribe for the general good of the whole.'

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"This definition of the privileges and immunities of citizens of the States is adopted in the main by this court in the recent case of Ward v. The State of Maryland, while it declines to undertake an authoritative definition beyond what was necessary to that decision. The description, when taken to include others not named, but which are of the same general character, embraces nearly every civil right for the establishment and protection of which organized government is instituted. They are, in the language of Judge Washington, those rights which are fundamental. Throughout his opinion, they are spoken of as rights belonging to the individual as a citizen of a State. They are so spoken of in the constitutional provision which he was construing. And they have always been held to be the class of rights which the State governments were created to establish and secure."

The controlling influence of the opinion in the SlaughterHouse Cases, as well as that of Mr. Justice Washington in Corfield v. Coryell, stands out in bolder relief when it is observed that in the latter case, following the statement of the general principles contained in the passage quoted in the Slaughter-House Cases, there is found, by way of illustration, an enumeration of particular rights declared to be clearly embraced by the general principles, one of which is described as, "The right of a citizen of one state to pass through, or reside in any other state, for purposes of trade, agriculture, professional pursuits, or otherwise."

Applying these doctrines, let us come to test the soundness of the implications from the Constitution relied upon to establish the absence of all state authority to deal with the individual wrongs complained of, and the possession by the Federal Government of power for that purpose; and, as pertinent thereto, to refer briefly to the authorities which it is assumed sustain those implications.

Undoubtedly the right of citizens of the States to reside peacefully in, and to have free ingress into and egress from,

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the several States had, prior to the Confederation, a twofold aspect: (1) as possessed in their own States and (2) as enjoyed in virtue of the comity of other States. But although the Constitution fused these distinct rights into one by providing that one State should not deny to the citizens of other States rights given to its own citizens, no basis is afforded for contending that a wrongful prevention by an individual of the enjoyment by a citizen of one State in another of rights possessed in that State by its own citizens was a violation of a right afforded by the Constitution. This is the necessary result of Article IV, § 2, which reserves to the several States authority over the subject, limited by the restriction against state discriminatory action, hence excluding federal authority except where invoked to enforce the limitation, which is not here the case; a conclusion expressly sustained by the ruling in United States v. Harris, 106 U. S. 629, 645, to the effect that the second section of Article IV, like the Fourteenth Amendment, is directed alone against state action. And this was but a summary of what had been previously pointed out in the Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36, where in dealing with the privileges and immunities embraced by Article IV, § 2, of the Constitution, it was observed (p. 77):

"It would be the vainest show of learning to attempt to prove by citations of authority, that up to the adoption of the recent amendments, no claim or pretence was set up that those rights depended on the Federal government for their existence or protection, beyond the very few express limitations which the Federal Constitution imposed upon the States-such, for instance, as the prohibition against ex post facto laws, bills of attainder, and laws impairing the obligation of contracts. But with the exception of these and a few other restrictions, the entire domain of the privileges and immunities of citizens of the States, as above defined, lay within the constitutional and legislative power

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of the States, and without that of the Federal government."

Nor is the situation changed by assuming that as a State has the power, by depriving its own citizens of the right to reside peacefully therein and to free ingress thereto and egress therefrom, it may, without violating the prohibitions of Article IV against discrimination, apply a like rule to citizens of other States, and hence engender, outside of Article IV, a federal right. This must be so since the proposition assumes that a State could, without violating the fundamental limitations of the Constitution other than those of Article IV, § 2, enact legislation incompatible with its existence as a free government and destructive of the fundamental rights of its citizens; and furthermore, because the premise upon which the proposition rests is state action and the existence of federal power to determine the repugnancy of such action to the Constitution, matters which, not being here involved, are not disputed.

This leads us furthermore to point out that the case of Crandall v. Nevada, 6 Wall. 35, so much relied upon in the argument, is inapplicable, not only because it involved the validity of state action, but because the state statute considered in that case was held to directly burden the performance by the United States of its governmental functions and also to limit rights of the citizens growing out of such functions; and hence it also follows that the observation made in Twining v. New Jersey, 211 U. S. 78, 97, to the effect that it had been held in the Crandall Case that the privilege of passing from State to State is an attribute of national citizenship, may here be put out of view as inapposite.

With the object of confining our decision to the case before us, we say that nothing we have stated must be considered as implying a want of power in the United States to restrain acts which, although involving ingress or