440 HASTINGS—POLICE POWER OF THE STATE. [June 19, 
ratified by two different proclamations, one of July 20 and one of 
July 28, 1868. The ratification was by several of the southern 
states a compliance with a condition imposed by Congress that only 
upon such ratification would representatives from those states be 
admitted to the federal legislature. 
The amendment is in five sections and much of it has only to do 
with temporary political conditions that have long gone by, it is 
hoped never toreturn. The first section, however, after providing 
that every person born in the United States and subject to its juris- 
diction shall be a citizen both of the United States and the state 
in which he lives, ordains that 
“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privi- 
leges 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.” 
Sections 2, 3, and 4 are, as suggested, of present importance only 
to the historian. 
The first section and the fifth, which gives Congress power to en- 
force the article by appropriate legislation, have produced that new 
development which renders it possible for the editors of the last 
editiog of Bouvier’s Dictionary of the Law to say truly, under the 
head of ‘‘ Police Power,’’ that there has been a vast development 
of this subject in this century, and most of it in the last thirty 
years. It was thirty years last July since, under the pressure of 
refusal of Congressional representation otherwise, five of the 
southern states ratified this amendment and it became part of the 
federal constitution. Public attention was strongly directed to it 
and yet, so long does it take for legal disputes to reach a crisis 
under our system, that it was not until 1872 that a case involving its 
construction came before the federal Supreme Court. 
When it did so come, the question raised was as far as possible 
from being connected in any way with the civil convulsions that 
had, as Dicey says, awakened the American sovereign from a 
1Jethargy of more than fifty years, and led to a change in the 
federal constitution. The question raised had to do simply with 
the butcher’s business in the city of New Orleans. It is not too 
much to say, however, that the opinion of Judge Miller in the 
1 Law of the Constitution, p. 140. 
