Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 9.djvu/346

318 3i8 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States." The important thing to be noticed in all the foregoing summary is that — except in the three specified cases of bills of attainder, ex post facto criminal laws, and laws impairing the obligation of contracts — no attempt was made to protect the individual citi- zens from oppressive treatment by their own States. The States could oppress their own citizens without limit in all matters of domestic concern. They could abolish trial by jury in criminal or civil cases. They could suppress freedom of speaking and establish a censorship of the press. It was not a part of the scheme of government embodied in the Constitution that the National Government should be authorized to interfere between any State and its own citizens. " To have authorized such intervention would have been to run counter to the whole spirit of the Constitution, which kept steadily in view, as the wisest policy, local government for local affairs, general government for general affairs only." ^ As there was no language in the Constitution which could afford any ground for supposing that the United States Supreme Court had any power of protecting a citizen in his rights, privi- leges, and immunities as against his own State and its tribunals, it is not surprising that few cases are to be found in which pro- tection for such rights has been sought in this quarter.^ This can- not be attributed to any unwillingness of the citizens to look to the National Power for such help as it could afford. The one clause in the Constitution extending the Federal protection to individual civil rights, — I refer to Article I. § lO, paragraph I, "No State shall. . . pass any. . . law impairing the obligation of con- tracts," — has given the United States Supreme Court more work to do and more cases to deal with than any other clause in the entire Constitution.^ Having shown as far as we may in the space allowed what the frame of the National Government was prior to the adoption of 1 Judge Cooley, cited in Bryce, The American Commonwealth, Vol. I. p. 331. See Harvard Law Review, Vol. I. pp. 322-326, Article by Wm. H. Dunbar, entitled " The Anarchists' Case." 2 See Scott v. Sanford, 19 Howard, 395, 452 (1856). 8 See Baker, Annotated Constitution of the United States {1891), pp. 68-101, for 4 partial list of such cases.