The bases of citizenship in this country are two, established in the Constitution of the United States and the legislation and decisions explanatory thereof: I. Every person, of whatever race descended, born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction, including children of American fathers born abroad, is _ipso facto_ a citizen of the United States. II. All other persons eligible for citizenship in the United States must acquire that citizenship through the legal process known as Naturalization. It was in the great case of Wong Kim Ark[17] that the Supreme Court, in 1897, established the right of _citizenship by birth on this soil, regardless of race or descent_. The question in this case involved a child born in California, of Chinese parents who, because of their race, could not themselves become citizens. In this decision, a classic in the law of American citizenship, the court set forth the following fundamental principles to be observed in determining citizenship by birth in the United States: 1. The Constitution of the United States must be interpreted in the light of the Common Law, under which every child born in England, even though of alien parents, was a natural-born citizen. 2. The qualifying words in the Fourteenth Amendment, “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” exclude two classes of persons--children born of alien enemies in hostile occupation, and children of diplomatic representatives of a foreign state. (The latter, from the earliest times, both under the laws of England and in decisions of American courts, had been recognized to be exceptions to the fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the national jurisdiction.) The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution,[18] adopted in 1868, incorporated no new rule or principle into American law. Neither did the Civil Rights Act, passed in 1866 as a Reconstruction measure, although it was the first statutory definition in the United States of citizenship by birth. That Act says: All persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are citizens of the United States and of the States where they reside. COMMON-LAW DEFINITION TAKEN FOR GRANTED The English Common Law, then, is the original source of our definition. That definition, taken over with the formation of the American Republic out of the English colonies, was so familiar, so much a part of the nature of things political, that nobody thought it necessary to formulate it--or a new one. By the Common Law of England, every person born within the dominions of the Crown, no matter whether of English or of foreign parents--and in the latter case whether the parents were settled or merely temporarily sojourning in the country, was an English subject; save only children of foreign ambassadors ... or a child born in hostile occupation of any part of the territories of England.[19]