The case of Yick Wo v. Hopkins19 involved the validity of an ordinance of the City of San Francisco which required all persons desiring to establish laundries in frame houses to obtain the consent of certain municipal officials. Here the law or ordinance was not upon its face discriminatory, but it was held void for the reason that it gave to the designated officials " not a discretion to be exercised upon a consideration of the circumstances of each case, but a naked and arbitrary power to give or withhold consent not only as to places but as to persons," and because the evidence showed in fact "an administration directed so exclusively against a particular class of persons [the Chinese] as to warrant and require the conclusion that whatever may have been the intent of the ordinances so adopted, they are applied by the public authorities charged with their administration and thus representing the State itself, with a mind so unequal and oppressive as to amount to a practical denial by the State of that equal protection of the law which is secured to the petitioners as to all other persons by the broad and benign provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment." The court then go on to declare the general doctrine: "Though the law be fair on its face, and impartial in appearance, yet, if it is applied and administered by public authority with an evil eye and unequal hand so as practically to make unjust and illegal discriminations between persons in similar circumstances, material to their rights, the denial of equal justice is still within the prohibition of the Constitution."20

18 See Gibson v. Mississippi, 162 U. S. 565; 16 Sup. Ct. Rep. 004; 40 L. ed. 1075.

19 118 U. S. 356; 6 Sup. Ct. Rep. 1064; 30 L. ed. 220.

20 This principle of interpretation is declared to have been sanctioned in Henderson v. Mayor, 92 V. S. 259 : 23 L. ed. 543; Chy Lung v. Freeman, 92 U. S. 275; 23 L. ed. 550; Ex parte Virginia, 100 U. S. 339; 25 L. ed. 676;