After some further talk General Butler said he agreed fully that the first ten amendments to the constitution were limitations of federal power and not restrictions of the rights of the States. The "privileges and immunities" however, claimed by these prisoners were privileges inherent in each one of the citizens of the several States of the United States, because in vast majority we were British subjects and had certain privileges and immunities inherited under the common law and Magna Charta, and among them, and the most thoroughly known and defined were the trial by jury for all high crimes, exemption from search and seizure without warrant of law, protection from self-accusation when a witness, and not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. We claim that all the rights, privileges, and immunities that belonged to a British subject under Magna Charta belong to each citizen of the United States; and that as new citizens of the United States were made, not citizens of States, by naturalization, these rights, privileges, and immunities came to them as citizens of the United States. The effect of the fourteenth amendment was to guarantee these rights, privileges, and immunities to the citizens of all the States. MEANING OF "DUE PROCESS OF LAW." The words "due process of law" as contained in the fourteenth amendment, and as used to define one of these guaranteed rights, mean "by the law of the land," not the law of a county, a province, or a State, but the law of the country--the whole country. That is the law of the land, and was so understood by our forefathers as due process of law. Any other meaning given to "due process of law" as it is used in the fourteenth amendment would make it simply ridiculous and frivolous, because any State may enact a "due process of law" according to that State, by which a man's life may be taken and from which not a single right or immunity of citizenship can protect him. Any law a State may make after the passage of this amendment for dealing with the rights of a citizen of the United States becomes wholly inoperative, because the "law of the land" must forever remain fixed as at that moment, not to be changed in regard to its citizens without a change of organic law, and for some purposes not to be even so changed. THE CASES OF FIELDEN AND SPIES.