Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 9.djvu/363

335 FEDERAL RESTRAINTS. 335 regulate. The reason for this is that both the charge and the actual transportation in such cases are exclusively confined to the limits of the territory of the State, and is not commerce among the States, or interstate commerce, but is exclusively commerce within the State. So far, therefore, as this class of transportation, as an element of commerce, is affected by the statute under consideration, it is not subject to the constitutional provision concerning commerce among the States." But, on the contra^ in relation to interstate commerce, the opinion, in summing up, said:— . " We must, therefore, hold that it is not, and never has been, the delib- erate opinion of a majority of this court, that a statute of a State which attempts to regulate the fares and charges by railroad companies within its limits for a transportation which constitutes a part of commerce among the States is a valid law." The result of this decision was practically to overrule the Granger Cases, and the court merely differentiated this case from those by saying that the main point considered in the latter was not the commerce clause in the Constitution, but the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the further clause of the Con- stitution relating to impairment of contracts by a State, and that it was never the intention of the court consciously to hold that a regulation of interstate rates of fare and freight was within the powers of a State. On this subject the court said: — " And the question how far a charge, made for a continuous trans- portation over several States, which included a State whose laws were in question, may be divided into separate charges for each State in enforcing the power of the State to regulate the fares of its railroads, was evidently not fully considered. . . . And the great question to be decided, and which was decided, and which was argued in all those cases, was the right of the State, within which a railroad company did business, to regulate or limit the amount of any of these traffic charges. [That is, the effect of the Fourteenth Amendment.]. . . The railroad companies set up another defence, apart from denying the general right of the legislature to regulate transportation charges, namely, that in their charters from the States, they each had a contract, express or implied, that they might regulate and estab- lish their own fares and rates of transportation. [That is, a vested charter right.] These two questions were of primary importance ; and though it is true that, as incidental or auxiliary to these, the question of the exclusive right of Congress to make such regulations of charges as any legislative power had the right to make, to the exclusion of the State, was presented, 44