ght choose to reside, because he
was antecedently a citizen of the United States.

The consequences that flowed from this radical change in the basis of
citizenship were numerous and weighty. Nor were those consequences
left subject to construction or speculation. They were incorporated
in the same section of the Amendment. The abuses which were formerly
heaped on the citizens of one State by the legislative and judicial
authority of another State were rendered thenceforth impossible. The
language of the Fourteenth Amendment is authoritative and mandatory:
"_No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the
privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall
any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due
process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the
equal protection of the laws_." Under the force of these weighty
inhibitions, the citizen of foreign birth cannot be persecuted by
discriminating statutes, nor can the citizen of dark complexion be
deprived of a single privilege or immunity which belong to the white
man. Nor can the Catholic, or the Protestant, or the Jew be placed
under ban or subjected to any deprivation of personal or religious
right. The provision is comprehensive and absolute, and sweeps away
at once every form of oppression and every denial of justice. It
abolishes _caste_ and enlarges the scope of human freedom. It
increases the power of the Republic to do equal and exact justice to
all its citizens, and curtails the power of the States to shelter the
wrong-doer or to authorize crime by a statute. To Congress is
committed the authority to enforce every provision of the Fourteenth
Amendment, and the humblest man who is denied the equal protection
of the laws of a State can have his wrongs redressed before the
Supreme Judiciary of the Nation.

It is perhaps not strange that the Democrats of the South were hostile
to the great results wrought for freedom, for justice, and for popular
rights by the Fourteenth Amendment. Their education, their prejudices,
their personal interests had all been in the opposite direction, and it
was doubtless too much to hope that all these would be overcome by a
victory for the Union--a victory which carried to their minds a sense
of personal humiliation and of remediless ruin. If their course was
unwise it is not altogether unintelligible. But the action of the
Northern Democrats cannot