Before its adoption, the Constitution of the United States did not in terms prescribe who should be citizens of the United States, yet there were necessarily such citizens without such provision. There cannot be a nation without a people. The very idea of a political community, such as a nation is, implies an association of persons for the promotion of their general welfare. Each one of the persons associated becomes a member of the nation formed by the association. He owes it allegiance and is entitled to its protection. Allegiance and protection are, in this connection, reciprocal obligations. The one is a compensation for the other; allegiance for protection and protection for allegiance. For convenience it has been found necessary to give a name to this membership. The object is to designate by a title the person and the relation he bears to the nation. For this purpose the words “subject,” “inhabitant,” and “citizen” have been used, and the choice between them is sometimes made to depend upon the form of government. “Citizen” is now more commonly employed, however, and as it has been considered better suited to the description of one living under a republican government, it was adopted by nearly all of the states upon their separation from Great Britain, and was afterward adopted in the Articles of Confederation and in the Constitution of the United States. When used in that sense it is understood as conveying the idea of membership of a nation, and nothing more. To determine, then, who were the citizens of the United States before the adoption of the [Fourteenth] amendment it is necessary to ascertain what persons originally associated themselves together to form the nation, and what were afterward admitted to membership. The effect of this decision, and of the Fourteenth Amendment whose meaning it declared, was to determine definitively that National Citizenship is paramount to State Citizenship. But it did not entirely absorb the latter into the former. In the famous “Slaughter House Cases”[36] the Supreme Court three years before had held that there might be citizens of the United States who were not citizens of any state, and that the Fourteenth Amendment applied particularly, if not solely, to the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, _as such_, and did not necessarily limit the right of a state to inflict disabilities upon its own citizens. The distinction between the two citizenships was thus stated in the Slaughter House cases:[37]