government, and is intended to protect life, liberty and property from arbitrary legis1ation.” Those cases which arose under the civil rights legislation, concerning the exclusion of negroes from juries when the accused was a colored person, if they are still to be regarded as law, must be deemed rather cases of denying the equal protection of the laws, since there the juries were not drawn professedly in accordance with the State statutes. No case has been found going to the extent of saying that action of a State court in professed obedience to a constitutional law and making no discrimination of race or color can be assailed as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The statute to be applied unquestionably may be, and its constitutionality is to be determined; but the acts of the State tribunals, it is believed, so long at any rate as they do not repudiate the statute, cannot be impeached. Thus where the question was whether a man had been deprived of an office without due process of law by proceedings under a State statute, it was said: “It is substantially admitted by counsel in the argument that such is not the case, if it has been done, in the due course of legal proceedings, according to those rules and forms which have been established for the protection of private rights. We accept this as a sufficient definition of the term ‘due process of law,’ for the purposes of the present case. The question before us is, not whether the courts below, having jurisdiction of the case and the parties, have followed the law, but whether the law, if followed, would have furnished Kennard the protection guaranteed by the Constitution. Irregularities and mere errors in the proceedings can only be corrected in the State courts. Our authority does not extend beyond an examination of the power of the courts below to proceed at all.” Kennard v. Louisiana, 92 U. S. 480, 481.
The ultimate question really is whether, by the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court of the United States is vested with authority to review the decisions of the State courts in all matters, criminal and civil, to determine whether State laws have been correctly interpreted and enforced. If due process of law depends upon the correct determination of facts or issues arising in the enforcement of local statutes, then in every case it becomes a federal question,— that is, a question arising under the Constitution and laws of the United States,— whether those facts and issues have been rightly found. If, such a question being brought before it, the court, by virtue of its duty to see that the Constitu-
