117. A corporation created by a State is a citizen of that State for many purposes, but cannot be a citizen of another State because created by the former State. Outside of the State of its creation it is a foreign corporation and possesses only such privileges as are granted to it. This means that rights, privileges, judgments accruing to or possessed by a corporation, say created by Pennsylvania and in Pennsylvania, do not accrue to and are not possessed by that corporation, say in Ohio, unless conferred by Ohio and possessed by the corporation within Ohio, under laws of Ohio, and by decision of Ohio courts. The principle here is the familiar one of jurisdiction. No State has power beyond its own jurisdiction and “the courts of no country execute the penal laws of another.”[293] The suability of a State involves its sovereignty and its honor and good faith. The constitutional law of America is that a State in the Union cannot be compelled to perform its contracts, although attempts on its part to avoid them may be judicially resisted, and State laws impairing the obligation of contracts are void. Yet the legislative department of a State represents its polity and its will and by every principle of justice is called upon to hold public obligations inviolate. Any departure from this rule, except for reasons most cogent (of which the Legislature and not the courts, is the judge) never fails in the end to incur the odium of the world, and to bring lasting injury upon the State itself. But to deprive the Legislature of the power of judging what the honor and safety of the State may require, even at the expense of a temporary failure to discharge the public debts, would be attended with greater evils than such failure can cause.[294] 118. The judicial power of the United States extends, under the Constitution to controversies between _citizens of different States_ and the Judiciary Act confers jurisdiction strictly within the meaning of the term.[295] _States_, as the word is used in the Constitution, means only members of the Union; a Territory is not a State; the citizen of a Territory is not a citizen of a State and any controversy at law which he may have with another person is not “a controversy between citizens of different States,” and therefore does not come within the judicial jurisdiction of the United States. Of course the limitation applies to artificial persons,—corporations created by a State. A corporation is not a citizen of the State and it cannot maintain a suit in a court of the United States against the citizen of a different State from that by which it was chartered, unless the persons who compose the corporate body are all citizens of that State.[296] The jurisdiction of American courts is co-extensive with the power that creates them. Thus the jurisdiction of federal courts depends in no way upon the State, and State judges “possess an absolute independence of the United States.”