488 HASTINGS—POLICE POWER OF THE STATE. [June 19, 
on a like certificate from Missouri, and the case against Singleton 
in the same way from New York; the case agaiast Ryan on error 
to the Circuit Court of California, and Robinson and wife against 
the railway from Tennessee on error. The Circuit Court of Cali- 
fornia had sustained a demurrer to the information against Ryan 
for refusing accommodation in his theatre to colored persons, and 
held the civil rights act unconstitutional. In Tennessee the Cir- 
cuit Court had held the law valid, but the plaintiff had been de- 
feated in a trial on the merits of her action, the jury finding that 
the railway conductor had reason to refuse admission to the plain- 
tiff aside from her color. 
The obvious question in all of these cases was the constitution- 
ality of the first two sections of the act of Congress of March 1, 
1875, originally enacted in substance in 1866, and the right of 
Congress to legislate in this manner for the people of the states. 
The first section provided that all persons in the jurisdiction of the 
United States should be entitled to equal accommodations and privi- 
leges in public inns, conveyances and places of amusement, subject 
only to conditions not relating to race, color or former servitude. 
The second section provided a penalty of five hundred dollars, to be 
paid to the persons aggrieved in case such equal accommodations 
were denied, and made every one who was in any way responsible 
for such denial guilty of misdemeanor and subject to a fine of from 
five hundred to cne thousand dollars, or to imprisonment for from 
thirty days to one year. 
Judge Bradley, who gave the opinion of the court, says that the 
principal argument for the constitutionality of the act was the 
views and opinions of distinguished senators advanced when the 
law was under discussion in their bodies, and that the authority, if 
any there is, in the federal constitution for such laws must be found 
in the last three amendments, and especially in the first section of 
the fourteenth; but this had been already held to be merely a 
prohibition on the states. 
‘Individual invasion of individual rights is not the subject-matter of 
the amendment. It has a deeper and a broader scope. It nullifies and 
makes void all state legislation and state action of every kind, which im- 
pairs the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, or 
which injures them in life, liberty or property without due process of law, 
or which denies to any of them the equal protection of the laws. It not 
only does this, but, in order that the national will thus declared may not 
