Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 10.djvu/376

 364 FEDERAL REPORTER. �■with the foregoing views. The new statute of New York being void under the decision in the Henderson Case, no authority upholding it as a law laying a duty on imports to execute an inspection law can be derived from section 10 of article 1. �In Railroad Co. v. Husen, 95 U. S. 465, 472, the prineiple of the Henderson Case was affirmed and applied as a priuciple ^Yh^ch for- bids a State from burdening foreign commerce under the cover of exercising its police powers. It is such a burden to tax all alien passengers arriving by vessel for the first time, and the fact of ex- amining or inspecting the persons of such passengers to see if they are good or bad, poor or rich, sane or lunatic, diseaaed or well, does not make the tax a tax to execute an inspection law. �Under this guise any law which required examination of any per- son or thing, and which used the word "inspeotion," could thereby bc made an inspection law, and the restraint of the constitution couhl be frittered away, so long as the duties laid did not exceed what was necessary to execute the particular law. But there is, moreover, or. the face of the act of May 28th, sufficient evidence that it can not be regarded as an inspection law. The acts of May 2Sth and May 31st cannot either of them derive any greater force from the fact that they are two acts, than the enactments in the two would have if they were all in one and the same act. The act of May 28th goes beyond the inspection and the ascertainment of the facts prescribed, and author- izes the commissioners to take the objectionable persons into their care or custody, and provide for the transportation and support of such persons "so long as they may be a necessary public charge." Some of the objectionable persons are defined to be "infirmor orphan persons, without means or capaeity to support themselves, and sub- ject to become a public charge," This is an eleemosynary System for supporting paupers, it may be for their lives. Able-bodied aliens arriving here for the first time, with means, in health, not among the classes called "objectionable" in the act, areto have a tax of one dol- lar laid for each of them to support such System. This is not an inspection law. It is a direct interference with the exclusive power of congress to regulate commerce with foreign nations. �It is urged for the plaintiffs that, inasmuch as section 10 of arti- cle 1 declares that the state inspection law shall be subject to the revision and control of congress, this court has no jurisdiction to revise or control the action of the state in exacting or administering the law. If the law is an inspection law, it is as such subject to the ��� �