Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/262

226 226 HARVARD LAW REVIEW holds that the Slaughter House decision "dwarfed and dulled the protective power of the amendment," and so it did. The paradox is that men of the school who always inclined against national au- thority while state power was rarely exercised, magnified the greater sovereign when the states seemed to rouse from the role of King Log. That Miller, J., conceived himself as guarding the gate against an invasion of social questions, vexatiously beyond the concept of historic common law, is a fair speculation, for the court of that date is not usually regarded as very tender of "state's rights." But that phrase has a perverted meaning, being popularly identified with Calhounism and nullification, and in a very true sense the court of the Slaughter House cases cherished state's rights in what they considered non-poHtical matters; vision was still con- centrated on the pohtical negro question. Ten years passed, and my legal generation came to the bar (io8 U. S. and 91 N. Y. were our first reports in 1883); down to that date appeals to due process were rare, and (barring the negro cases) never successful except on the procedural side. There Pennoyer v. Nejf^^ is a true monument, laying down, in strict ac- cordance with tradition, the requirement of a good judgment in personam, and for Field to write the opinion was doubtless a labor of love. When this generation of mine opened the reports, the chill of the Slaughter House decision was on the bar, with the added discouragement of the Granger cases,^^ whose language, and we thought decision, seemed to put all complaints of corporate regulation of service and charges out of court, if an appeal under the due-process clause was ventured against a state; the still con- tinuing dissents of Judge Field seemed most unorthodox. The remark in another judgment, that due process was usually what the state ordained,^" seemed to chnch the matter. But the changes, before alluded to as wholly unrelated to our professional activities, but big with legal importance, were daily becoming more apparent. The youngsters of to-day of course regard the early '8o's of the last century as sadly reactionary and stagnating in conservatism, but we thought ourselves progressive reformers, as does every age and generation of recorded history " 95 U. S. 714 (1877). " 94 U. S. 113 (1876) et seq.
 * ° Walker v. Sauvinet, 92 U. S. 90 (1875).