Within this view, all the ordinary civil rights enjoyed by citizens were still within the control of the organs of the state government and not within Federal protection at all. If the privileges and immunities, brought within the protection of the Federal Government by the Fourteenth Amendment, were intended to embrace the whole domain of personal and property rights, then, contended the justice, the Supreme Court would be constituted "a perpetual censor upon all legislation of the states, on the civil rights of their own citizens, with authority to nullify such as it did not approve as consistent with those rights as they existed at the time of the adoption of this Amendment.... We are convinced that no such results were intended by the Congress which proposed these amendments nor by the legislatures which ratified them." In two short paragraphs, Justice Miller disposed of the contention of the plaintiffs in error to the effect that the Louisiana statute deprived the plaintiffs of their property without due process of law. He remarked that inasmuch as the phraseology of this clause was also to be found in the Fifth Amendment and in some form in the constitutions of nearly all of the states, it had received satisfactory judicial interpretation; "and it is sufficient to say," he concluded on this point, "that under no construction of that provision that we have ever seen or any that we deem admissible, can the restraint imposed by the state of Louisiana upon the exercise of their trade by the butchers of New Orleans be held to be a deprivation of private property within the meaning of that provision." Coming now to that clause requiring every state to give all persons within its jurisdiction equal protection of the laws, Justice Miller indulged in the false prophecy: "We doubt very much whether any action of a state not directed by way of discrimination against the negroes as a class or on account of their race will ever be held to come within the purview of this provision." An emergency might arise, he admitted, but he found no such a one in the case before him. Concluding his opinion, he expressed the view that the American Federal system had come out of the Civil War with its main features unchanged, and that it was the duty of the Supreme Court then as always to hold with a steady and an even hand the balance between state and Federal power. "Under the pressure of all the excited feeling growing out of the War," he remarked, "our statesmen have still believed that the existence of the states with powers for domestic and local government, including the regulation of civil rights--the rights of person and property--was essential to the perfect working of our complex form of government, though they have thought proper to impose additional limitations upon the states and to confer additional power on that of the nation."