In Justice Miller's long opinion there is no hint of that larger and more comprehensive purpose entertained by the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment which was asserted by Mr. Conkling a few years later in his argument before the Supreme Court. If he was aware that the framers had in mind not only the protection of the freedmen in their newly won rights, but also the defense of corporations and business enterprises generally against state legislation, he gave no indication of the fact. There is nowhere in his opinion any sign that he saw the broad economic implications of the Amendment which he was expounding for the first time in the name of the Court. On the contrary, his language and the opinion reached in the case show that the judges were either not cognizant of the new economic and political duty placed upon them, or, in memory of the states' rights traditions which they had entertained, were unwilling to apply the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments in such a manner as narrowly to restrict the legislative power of a commonwealth.
In taking up that clause of the Fourteenth Amendment which provides that no state shall make or enforce any law abridging the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, Justice Miller declared that it was not the purpose of that provision to transfer the security and protection of all fundamental civil rights from the state government to the Federal Government. A citizen of the United States as such, he said, has certain privileges and immunities, and _it was these and these only_ which the Fourteenth Amendment contemplated. He enumerated some of them: the right of the citizen to come to the seat of government, to assert any claim he may have upon that government, to transact any business he may have with it, to seek its protection, share its offices, engage in administering its functions, to have free access to its seaports, subtreasuries, land offices, and courts of justice, to use the navigable waters of the United States, to assemble peaceably with his fellow citizens and petition for redress of grievances, and to enjoy the privileges of the writ of habeas corpus. It was rights of this character, the learned justice argued, and not all the fundamental rights of person and property which had been acquired in the evolution of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, that were placed by the Fourteenth Amendment under the protection of the Federal Government.