1912.] OF THE UNITED STATES. 373 



upon the effectiveness of act of Congress and treaty provision when 

 in conflict with an exercise of State police power. We have seen 

 that they do not " affect the subject, and each other, like equal 

 opposing powers " ; but that the State police power, whatever be the 

 definition or intendment of that term, must yield. So held John 

 Marshall in Gibbons z's. Ogden, and such, after avowed aberration 

 by some judges and covert disloyalty by others to the doctrine, is the 

 law today. Tlie cases, with the possible exception of the Passenger 

 Cases, have been illustrations of conflict with act of Congress and 

 not with treaty. But by the Sixth Article of the Constitution, and 

 by its interpretation in Gibbons I's. Ogden, no distinction is drawn 

 between their equal and controlling supremacy; This is confirmed 

 by the long line of cases holding that between statute and treaty, 

 the latest expression of the Federal will must prevail.-*^ The logic 

 itself of the situation admits of no distinction. Marshall had said 

 of the power to regulate commerce: 



" The power is co-extensive with the subject on which it acts, and cannot 

 be stopped at the external boundary of a State, but must enter its interior." 



So necessarily must it be with the power to make treaties. Is it 

 thinkable that that power may be " stopped at the external boundary 

 of a State"? Aliens "must enter its interior," as commerce does; 

 and the power of the United States to provide for such aliens by 

 treaty must accompany them. In ovtr review of the causes which led 

 to the creation of the Sixth Article of the Constitution, of the pur- 

 poses it was intended to subserve, of the interpretations placed upon 

 it by contemporaries, it was seen as a universally admitted fact, 

 that treaty provisions had been stopped at State boundaries, and it 

 was accordingly provided that under the Constitution the treaty 

 power should enter the interior of the States and there operate as 

 a supreme manifestation of the Federal will. And this was the 

 deliberate and reiterated judgment of the Supreme Court in the cases 

 analyzed beginning with Ware 7's. Hylton. If, in the definition of 

 some lawyers, no State statute under examination in these cases was an 

 exercise of the police power, we have none the less seen that the long 

 list of cases beginning with Gibbons vs. Ogden and Brown vs. Mary- 



^' Supra, 83-99. 



