In spite of important testimony to the effect that those who drafted the Fourteenth Amendment really intended "to nationalize liberty," that is _laissez faire_, against state legislatures, the Supreme Court at first refused to accept this broad interpretation, and it was not until after several of the judges of the old states' rights school had been replaced by judges of the new school that the claims of Mr. Conkling's group as to the Fourteenth Amendment were embodied in copious judicial decisions. _The Slaughter-House Cases_ The first judicial interpretation of the significant phrases of the Fourteenth Amendment which were afterward to be the basis of judicial control over state economic legislation of every kind was made by the Supreme Court in the Slaughter-House cases in 1873--five years after that Amendment had been formally ratified. These particular cases, it is interesting to note, like practically all other important cases arising under the Fourteenth Amendment, had no relation whatever to the newly emancipated slaves; but, on the contrary, dealt with the regulation of business enterprises. In 1869, the legislature of Louisiana passed an act designed to protect the health of the people of New Orleans and certain other parishes. This act created a corporation for the purpose of slaughtering animals within that city, forbade the establishment of any other slaughterhouses or abattoirs within the municipality, and conferred the sole and exclusive privilege of conducting the live-stock landing and slaughterhouse business, under the limitations of the act, upon the company thus created. The company, however, was required by the law to permit any persons who wished to do so to slaughter in its houses and to make full provision for all such slaughtering at a reasonable compensation. This drastic measure, the report of the case states, was denounced "not only as creating a monopoly and conferring odious and exclusive privileges upon a small number of persons at the expense of the great body of the community of New Orleans, but ... it deprives a large and meritorious class of citizens--the whole of the butchers of the city--of the right to exercise their trade, the business to which they have been trained and on which they depend for the support of themselves and their families."