Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 4.djvu/247

231 POLICE POWER AND INTER-STATE COMMERCE. 231 therefore void ; and that it was none the less a regulation of inter- state commerce because it regulated the internal commerce of the State in the same way. There was no pretence that the business of the plaintiff in error — selling stationery, etc., by sample — was inimical to the health or safety of the State, or that the law was jDassed in the exercise of the police power. This case covers an entirely different ground from Walling v. Michigan, and does not in any way impeach or modify that case. None of these cases, therefore, sustain the proposition that inter- state commerce is not within the jurisdiction of the police power of a State. Indeed, there is no authority for such a doctrine, unless it be found in Leisy v. Hardin. Notwithstanding the language used by the court in Leisy v. Hardin, it is not at all certain that they intended to decide the case on the ground that the police power of a State does not include inter-state commerce within its jurisdiction. The law in question prohibited traffic, which is somewhat different from regulating it ; and it may be that the court thought that such a law was more a commercial regulation than a police regulation. The following language seems to bear this interpretation : *' Whenever the law of the State amounts essentially to a regulation of commerce with foreign nations or among the States, as it does when it inhibits, directly or indirectly, the receipt of an imported commodity, or its disposition before it has ceased to become an article of trade be- tween one State and another, or another country and this, it comes in conflict with a power which in this particular has been ex- clusively vested in the general government, and is, therefore, void." ^ "To concede to a State the power to exclude, directly or indirectly, articles [of inter-state commerce] without congressional permis- sion, is to concede to a majority of the people of a State represented in the State Legislature the power to regulate commercial inter- course between the States,by determining what shall be its subjects, when that power was distinctly granted to be exercised by the people of the United States represented in Congress. "^ In Bowman v. Chicago & N. W. Railway Co., Mr. Justice Field puts his concurring opinion expressly upon this ground. After noticing that the police power can be applied to inter-state commerce, re- ferring to Mugler v. Kansas,^ where a State law prohibiting the manufacture of intoxicating liquors within the limits of the State 1 135 u. S. 100, 123. « Ibid. 125. ^123 U.S. 623. L