Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/938

902 902 HARVARD LAW REVIEW INDIRECT ENCROACHMENT ON FEDERAL AUTHORITY BY THE TAXING POWERS OF THE STATES 1 VIII III. Summary and Conclusion TTT'E are often told that a state cannot tax interstate commerce ^^ or an instrumentality of the federal government. This is commonly accepted legal doctrine. But in the law, as in human life elsewhere, actions speak louder than words. What judges actually permit and prohibit is more important than what they say about their approval and their disapproval. By their fruits ye shall know them better than by their professions. If judges do in fact permit the states to tax interstate commerce and the instru- mentalities of the federal government, that commerce and those instrumentalities may be taxed by the states, all doctrine to the contrary notwithstanding. It is perhaps too much to hope that all conflict between the for- mulations of legal doctrine and the substantial results of legal decisions will ever be resolved. Until all catch phrases which clothe half truths in the majesty of the universal and the absolute are banished from common speech, we cannot expect the imaginary deity which calls itself The Law to be free from the foibles of its mortal makers. But those who are interested in law, not as a conceptualist vision, but as an instrument for the actual ordering of human affairs, must necessarily seek to discover how the law does actually order human affairs. They will wish to make their own formulations of the law as it is laid down and applied by those duly vested with authority in the matter. They will be unwilling to accept the formulations of others that do not square with results of the adjudications. When in this frame of mind we approach the limitations im- posed upon the taxing powers of the states by the existence of Qanuary, 1918); Ibid., 572-618 (February, 1918); Ibid., 721-78 (March, 1918); Ibid., 932-53 (May, 1918); 32 Harv. L. Rev. 234-65 (January, 1919); Ibid., 374-416 (Febru- ary, 1919); and Ibid., 634-78 (April, 1919).
 * For preceding instalments of this discussion, see 31 Harv. L. Rev. 321-72