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The rules of legal construction are universal, their purpose being to direct in the ascertainment of the true meaning and intent of the instrument to which they are applied. There is not one class of canons of interpretation applicable to constitutional clauses, another to statutes, and still another, to private instruments; much less is there one class for one section or article of the Constitution, and another for another. Palpably, by the most plain and obvious rules of construction, the clause here considered has respect to the proprietary rights of the United States and to these alone. The inhabitants of Utah, of Wyoming or of Arizona, are not the territory of the United States; they are in no sense public property. They are human beings, entitled, according to the principles upon which alone, it is affirmed, rightful government can be founded, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, in their own way under the rule: Freedom in each to do whatever is not inconsistent with equal freedom in every other.
The statute in question has nothing whatever to do with the proprietary rights of the United States, unless upon the presumption that the people of the Territories are chattels of the nation, that they stand to the government in the relation of serfs, having no rights which it is under either legal or moral obligation to consider, or as apprentices whose personalities are merged in and absorbed by the body politic to which belongs the unsold residue of the land in the region they inhabit. It is a very violent presumption. There is nothing in the physical, the moral, or the intellectual character, or phenomena of the people of the Territories by which they may be distinguished from those of the States. There is nothing to indicate want of competency in them to the regulation of their own civil affairs. It is not to be believed that, taking their lives in their hands and going forth into the wilderness, to plant and build and lay the foundations of other increments to this broad republic, they, either consciously or unconsciously, divested themselves of those qualities which—unless our entire system of political ideas is a falsehood, and the principles upon which it was erected fallacies—are inseparable from humanity.
The framers of the Constitution were wise men. They had just come out of a struggle for civil freedom, and appreciated the force of the phrase "human liberty," more vividly, perhaps, than the statesmen who are their successors. Every word of the in-
