Accordingly, the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, enunciating the broad legal and political doctrine that no state "shall abridge the privileges or immunity of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any _person_ of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any _person_ within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law." Here was a restriction laid upon state legislatures which might be substantially limitless in its application, in the hands of a judiciary wishing to place the broadest possible interpretation upon it. What are privileges and immunities? What are life, liberty, and property? What is due process of law? What is the equal protection of the law? Does the term "person" include not only natural persons but also artificial persons, namely, corporations? That the reconstruction committee of Congress which framed the instrument intended to include within the scope of this generous provision not only the negro struggling upward from bondage, but also corporations and business interests struggling for emancipation from legislative interference, has been often asserted. In arguing before the Supreme Court in the San Matteo County case, on December 19, 1882, Mr. Roscoe Conkling, who had been a member of the committee which drafted the Fourteenth Amendment, unfolded for the first time the deep purpose of the committee, and showed from the journal of that committee that it was not their intention to confine the amendment merely to the protection of the colored race. In the course of his argument, Mr. Conkling remarked, "At the time the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, as the records of the two Houses will show, individuals and joint-stock companies were appealing for congressional and administrative protection against invidious and discriminating state and local taxes. One instance was that of an express company, whose stock was owned largely by citizens of the State of New York, who came with petitions and bills seeking Acts of Congress to aid them in resisting what they deemed oppressive taxation in two states, and oppressive and ruinous rules of damages applied under state laws. That complaints of oppression in respect of property and other rights, made by citizens of Northern States who took up residence in the South, were rife, in and out of Congress, none of us can forget; that complaints of oppression in various forms, of white men in the South,--of 'Union men,'--were heard on every side, I need not remind the Court. The war and its results, the condition of the freedmen, and the manifest duty owed to them, no doubt brought on the occasion for constitutional amendment; but when the occasion came and men set themselves to the task, the accumulated evils falling within the purview of the work were the surrounding circumstances, in the light of which they strove to increase and strengthen the safeguards of the Constitution and laws."[19]