The comity clause does not entitle a citizen within his own State to privileges and immunities which may be granted by other States to their citizens. In other words, it does not require that when a right is granted by any one of the States of the Union to its citizens, it thereby becomes a right which all the other States must grant to their citizens. This claim, extreme as it may appear, was raised in McKane v. Durston13 but negatived by the court as scarcely worth an argument. "Whatever may be the scope of Section 2 of Article IV," said the court, . . . "the Constitution of the United States does not make the privileges and immunities enjoyed by the citizens of one State under the Constitution and laws of that State, the measure of the privilege and immunities to be enjoyed, as of right, by the citizens of another State under its Constitution and laws. ...A citation of authorities upon the point is unnecessary."

12 The opinion continues: "If Virginia had by law provided for the sale of its once vast public domain, and a division of the proceeds among its own people, no one, we venture to say, would contend that the citizens of other States had a constitutional right to the enjoyment of this privilege of Virginia citizenship. Neither if, instead of selling, the State had appropriated the same property to be used as a common by its people for the purposes of agriculture, could the citizens of other States avail themselves of such a privilege. And the reason is obvious: the right thus granted is not a privilege or immunity of general but of special citizenship. It does not 'belong of right to the citizens of all free government,' but only to the citizens of Virginia, on account of the peculiar circumstances in which they are placed. They, and they alone, owned the property to be sold or used, and they alone had the power to dispose of it as they saw fit. They owned it not by virtue of citizenship merely, but of citizenship and domicile united; that is to say, by virtue of a citizenship confined to that particular locality. The planting of oysters in the soil covered by water owned in common by the People of the State is not different in principle from that of planting corn upon dry land held in the same way. Both are for the purpose of cultivation and profit; and if the State, in the regulation of its public domain, can grant to its own citizens the exclusive use of dry lands, we see no reason why it may not do the same thing in reaped to such as are covered by water. And as all concede that a State may grant to one of its citizens the exclusive use of part of the common property, the conclusion would seem to follow, that it might by appropriate legislation confine the use of the whole to its own people alone."

13 153 U. S. 6S4; 14 Sup. Ct. Rep. 913; 38 L. ed. 8G7.

It also scarcely needs argument that under this equal privileges clause a citizen of one State residing, or having legal interests in another State, may not lay claim to privileges and immunities which his own State grants him, but which the other State does not grant to its own citizens.

In Paul v. Virginia14 the court say: "The privileges and immunities secured to citizens of each State in the several States, by the provision in question, are those privileges and immunities which are common to the citizens in the latter States under their Constitution and laws by virtue of their being citizens. Special privileges enjoyed by citizens in their own States are not secured in other States by this provision. It was not intended by the provision to give to the laws of one State any operation in other States. They can have no such operation, except by the permission, express or implied, of those States."