ncipated or not,
yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or
privileges but such as those who held the power and the
government might choose to grant them.

"It is not the province of the court to decide upon the justice
or injustice, the policy or impolicy, of these laws....

"In discussing this question, we must not confound the rights of
citizenship which a State may confer within its own limits, and
the rights of citizenship as a member of the Union. It does not
by any means follow, because he has all the rights and privileges
of a citizen of a State, that he must be a citizen of the United
States. He may have all of the rights and privileges of the
citizen of a State, and yet not be entitled to the rights and
privileges of a citizen of any other State. For, previous to the
adoption of the Constitution of the United States, every State
had the undoubted right to confer on whomsoever it pleased the
character of citizen, and to endow him with all its rights. But
this character of course was confined to the boundaries of the
State, and gave him no rights or privileges in other States
beyond those secured to him by the laws of nations and the comity
of States. Nor have the several States surrendered the power of
conferring these rights and privileges by adopting the
Constitution of the United States. Each State may still confer
them upon an alien, or any one it thinks proper, or upon any
class or description of persons; yet he would not be a citizen in
the sense in which that word is used in the Constitution of the
United States, nor entitled to sue as such in one of its courts,
nor to the privileges and immunities of a citizen in the other
States. The rights which he would acquire would be restricted to
the State which gave them. The Constitution has conferred on
Congress the right to establish an uniform rule of
naturalization, and this right is evidently exclusive, and has
always been held by this court to be so. Consequently no State,
since the adoption of the Constitution, can, by naturalizing an
alien, invest him with the rights and privileges secured to a
citizen of a State under the Federal Government, although, so far
as the State alone was concerned, he would undoubtedly be
entitled to the rights of a citizen