Peter Vivian Daniel

“ The Constitution itself is nothing more than an enumeration of general abstract rules, promulged by the several States, for the guidance and control of their creature or agent, the federal government, which for their exclusive benefit they were about to call into being. Apart from these abstract rules the federal government can have no functions and no existence. All its attributes are strictly derivative, and any and every attempt to transcend the foundations (those prosclibed abstractions) on which its existence depends, is an attempt at anarchy, violence, and usurpation. ”

“ Every one must be sensible that the seat of a man's business, of his daily pursuits and occupations, must probably, if not necessarily, be the place of his residence; yet here we find it expressly ruled, that such a commorancy by no just legal intendment any more than by express language, constitutes him a citizen of that community or State in which he may happen to be then residing or transacting his business ”

“ There cannot be a more striking example than is instanced by the case before us, of the mischiefs that must follow from disregarding the language, the plain words, or what may be termed the body, the corpus, of the Constitution, to ramble in pursuit of some ignis fatuus of construction or implication, called its spirit or its intention,-a spirit not unfrequently about as veracious, and as closely connected with the Constitution, as are the spirits of the dead with the revolving tables and chairs which, by a fashionable metempsychosis of the day, they are said to animate. ”

“ For in no one step in the progress of this attempt, is it denied that a corporation is not and cannot be a citizen, nor that a citizen does not mean a corporation, nor that the assertion of a power by an individual outside of the corporation, and interfering with and controlling its organization and functions, (whatever might be the degree of interest owned by that individual in the corporation,) would be incompatible with the existence of the corporate body itself. ”

“ For this new class of citizen corporations, incongruous as it must appear to every legal definition or conception, is not less incongruous nor less novel to the relation claimed for it, or rather for its total want of relation to the settled adjudications of this court. It is strictly a new creation, an alien and an intruder, and is at war with almost all that has gone before it ”

“ Thus it has been insisted that a corporation, created by a State, can have no being or faculties beyond the limits of that State; and if its president and officers reside within that State such a conjuncture will meet and satisfy the predicament laid down by the Constitution. ”

“ The Bank of North America covers that how under consideration, and how strongly and emphatically it rebukes the effort to claim by indirect and violent construction, powers for the federal courts which not only have never been delegated to them, nor implied by the silence of the Constitution, but still more powers assumed in definance of its express inhibition. ”

“ By the disciples of this new morality it seems to be thought that the mandates or axioms of the Constitution, when found obstructing the way to power, and when they cannot be overstepped by truth or logic, may be conveniently turned and shunned under the denomination of abstractions or refinements ”

“ If it does, then a change of residence by officers, agents, or stockholders, or a transfer of a portion of the interests of the latter, would destroy the qualification of citizenship depending upon locality. If it would not have this effect, then this anomalous citizen may possess the rights of both plaintiff and defendant, nay, by a sort of plural being or ubiquity, may be a citizen of every State in the Union, may even be a State and a citizen of the same State at the same time. ”

“ The principle stare decisis, adopted by the courts in order to give stability to private rights, and to prevent the mischiefs incident to mutations for light and insufficient causes, is doubtless a wholesome rule of decision when derived from legitimate and competent authority, and when limited to the necessity which shall have demanded its application ”

“ We cannot, however, resist the disposition to ask of those whose expanded and more pervading view can penetrate beyond the palpable form of the charter, what it is they mean to convey by the term abstraction, which is found so well adapted to their purposes? ”