It was undoubtedly the object of the clause in question to place the citizens of each State
upon the same footing with citizens of other States, so far as the advantages resulting
from citizenship in those States are concerned. It relieves them from the disabilities of
alienage in other States; it inhibits discriminating legislation against them by other States;
it gives them the right of free ingress into other States, and egress from them; it insures to
them in other States the same freedom possessed by the citizens of those States in the
acquisition and enjoyment of property and in the pursuit of happiness; and it secures to
them in other States the equal protection of their laws. It has been justly said that no
provision in the Constitution has tended so strongly to constitute the citizens of the
United States one people as this.

But if the government has these rights on her own account, the citizen also has correlative rights. He has the right to come to the seat of government to assert any claim he may have upon that government, or to transact any business he may have with it. To seek its protection, to share its offices, to engage in administering its functions. He has a right to free access to its sea-ports, through which all the operations of foreign trade and commerce are conducted, to the sub-treasuries, the land offices, the revenue offices, and the courts of justice in the several States, and this right is in its nature independent of the will of any State over whose soil he must pass in the exercise of it.
The views here advanced are neither novel nor unsupported by authority. The question of the taxing power of the States, as its exercise has affected the functions of the Federal government, has been repeatedly considered by this [73 U.S. 35, 45]   court, and the right of the States in this mode to impede or embarrass the constitutional operations of that government, or the rights which its citizens hold under it, has been uniformly denied.

...

It will be observed that it was not the extent of the tax in that case which was complained of, but the right to levy any tax of that character. So in the case before us it may be said that a tax of one dollar for passing through the State of Nevada, by stage coach or by railroad, cannot sensibly affect any function of the government, or deprive a citizen of any valuable right. But if the State can tax a railroad passenger one dollar, it can tax him one thousand dollars. If one State can do this, so can every other State. And thus one or more States covering the only practicable routes of travel from the east to the west, or from the north to the south, may totally prevent or seriously burden all transportation of passengers from one part of the country to the other. [73 U.S. 35, 47]   A case of another character in which the taxing power as exercised by a State was held void because repugnant to the Federal Constitution, is that of Brown v. The State of Maryland. 9 The State of Maryland required all importers of foreign merchandise, who sold the same by wholesale, by bale or by package, to take out a license, and this act was claimed to be unconstitutional. The court held it to be so on three different grounds: first, that it was a duty on imports; second, that it was a regulation of commerce; and third, that the importer who had paid the duties imposed by the United States, had acquired a right to sell his goods in the same original packages in which they were imported. To say nothing of the first and second grounds, we have in the third a tax of a State declared to be void, because it interfered with the exercise of a right derived by the importer from the laws of the United States. If the right of passing through a State by a citizen of the United States is one guaranteed to him by the Constitution, it must be as sacred from State taxation as the right derived by the importer from the payment of duties to sell the goods on which the duties were paid. -



...

In The Passenger Cases, to which reference has already been made, Justice Grier, with whom Justice Catron concurred, makes this one of the four propositions on which they held the tax void in those cases. Judge Wayne expresses his assent to Judge Grier's views; and perhaps this ground received the concurrence of more of the members of the court who constituted the majority than any other. But the principles here laid down may be found more clearly stated in the dissenting opinion of the Chief Justice in those cases, and with more direct pertinency to the case now before us than anywhere else. After expressing his views fully in favor of the validity of the tax, which he said had exclusive reference to foreigners, so far as those cases were concerned, he proceeds to say, for the purpose of preventing misapprehension, that so far as the tax affected American citizens it could not in his opinion be maintained. He then adds: 'Living as we do under a common government, charged with the great concerns of the whole Union, every citizen of the United States from the most remote States or territories, is entitled to free access, not only to the principal departments established at Washington, but also to its judicial tribunals and public offices in every State in the Union. . . . For all the great purposes for which the Federal government was formed we are one people, with one common country. [73 U.S. 35, 49]   We are all citizens of the United States, and as members of the same community must have the right to pass and repass through every part of it without interruption, as freely as in our own States. And a tax imposed by a State, for entering its territories or harbors, is inconsistent with the rights which belong to citizens of other States as members of the Union, and with the objects which that Union was intended to attain. Such a power in the States could produce nothing but discord and mutual irritation, and they very clearly do not possess it.'

Although these remarks are found in a dissenting opinion, they do not relate to the matter on which the dissent was founded. They accord with the inferences which we have already drawn from the Constitution itself, and from the decisions of this court in exposition of that instrument.
Those principles, as we have already stated them in this opinion, must govern the present case.