Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/297

261 INDIRECT ENCROACHMENT ON FEDERAL AUTHORITY 261 entry into the field of interstate commerce, and the Supreme Court would have done well to recognize it more frankly and to find a way to justify it that breathed none of the atmosphere of that moonshine and dreamland which is referred to as the bourne in which business men do not invest. Such justification is by no means difficult. The brief of Mr. Carter on behalf of the express companies gave the court a clue to the most solid of reasons for sustaining the tax which that brief condemned. For Mr. Carter was a jurist as well as an advocate. And in the present instance he analyzed the problem for us most helpfully. The basis for the general doctrine of the immunity of interstate commerce from state taxation, he states as follows: "There is no constitutional provision in terms forbidding the States to impose burdens by way of taxation upon interstate commerce. The prohibition is a necessary implication arising from the fact that the sub-- ject-matter is one placed exclusively under the sovereign control of Con- gress, and the imposition of burdens upon it by the States, whether by taxation or otherwise, would be a denial of that sovereignty and false assumption by the States of a power over it, which, if it existed, might be so exercised as to destroy it." "^ And then he adds the significant qualification: "There is one necessary exception to the rule that the States cannot tax interstate commerce. Inasmuch as the existence of the States is necessary to the existence of interstate commerce, that ordinary system of taxation which is necessary to the existence of the States, namely, taxation upon all property within them, must be permitted, and the property employed in interstate commerce is not to be exempted. This exception is, indeed, rather apparent than real; for where no burden can be put upon property employed in interstate commerce without being at the same time put upon all other property, interstate commerce is not really burdened. Were it not subject to taxation in this form the effect would be to confer upon it an affirmative advantage equivalent to a pecuniary bounty equal to the amount of the tax from which it is exempted." "^ tion of franchises, embracing all things which the corporation is given power to do, and this power to do is as much a thing of value and a part of the intangible property of the corporation as the franchise to be. Franchises to do go wherever the work is done." (166 U. S. 185, 223-24). "» 165 U. S. 194, 217, 41 L. Ed. 694 (1897.) "^ Ibid., 194, 217-18.