Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 9.djvu/357

329 FEDERAL RESTRAINTS, 329 erty of either State, and therefore free from State control; and there appears no way to reconcile the two cases in this particular. Lord V. Steamship Company/ in Lehigh Valley Railroad Co. v, Pennsylvania, supra, was also distinguished, or rather overruled upon the ground upon which it had been decided, and supported upon another. That was a case in which the issue was whether Congress had the power to regulate the liability of the owners of vessels navigating the high seas, but engaged only in the trans- portation of freight and passengers between ports in the same State. Waite, C. J., in delivering the opinion of the court, rested it solely upon the commercial clause of the Constitution, and ex- pressly omitted all reference to the judicial power of the United States over cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction. He said : — " She [the Ventura] was navigating among the vessels of other nations, and was treated by them as belonging to the country whose flag she carried. True, she was not trading with them, but she was navigating with them, and consequently with them was engaged in commerce. If in her navigation she inflicted a wrong on another country, the United States, and not the State of California, must answer for what was done. In every just sense, therefore, she was while on the ocean engaged in commerce with foreign nations, and as such she and the business in which she was engaged were subject to the regulating power of Congress." The terms of the contract of carriage, therefore, were held to be subject to the control of Congress, and that although the transpor- tation was between ports in the same State. The question, it is true, affected an instrument of commerce as well as a mere con- tract for carriage, but the reason that the transportation was held a transaction of interstate commerce was that the carriage was upon the high seas out of the jurisdiction of the State. It does not differ in principle from the case of goods passing out of a State and into it again while in continuous transit between two points in the same State, and if it is good law, Lehigh Valley Railroad Co. v, Pennsylvania, supra, is not. Undoubtedly, how- ever, as the court says in the latter case, the decision can be jus- tified on the principle of /« re Garnett,^ by holding the statute a modification by Congress of the general admiralty and maritime law, and the case is perhaps more properly based upon that 1 102 u. S. 541. * 141 U. S. I.