FIFTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART IV. 279 



I. 



REPORT OF THE SECRETARY. 



C. Y. KNIGHT, CHICAGO, ILL. 



Mr. President, Ladies and Genilemen—Fresident Shilling's statement 

 that his part of the work of the National Dairy Union is a very small part, 

 reminds me of the story of the Irishman who was a hod carrier. Somebody 

 was asking him if it was not an awful hard life to be a hod carrier. He 

 said, "no, begorrah; I carry the brick to the top of the building and the man 

 up there does the work." My position now with Mr. Shilling is a good 

 deal like that; he carries the bricks up and I do the work. 



The most important of all the work that has ever been done by the 

 National Dairy Union has been accomplished during the past year. There 

 have been, since our last meeting, decisions in the United States Supreme 

 Court in four cases, which were carried up by the oleomargarine manufact- 

 urers under the new law. Those cases involved technicalities through which 

 they sought to find a loophole in the ten cent tax law, expecting they would 

 be successful in winning at least one case, figuring that their chances in 

 bringing the cases before the Supreme Court would give them at least one 

 chance in four, and all they cared was for that one chance. 



In every one of the four cases which they have brought before the Supreme 

 Court they have been unsuccessful. The court has decided in favor of the 

 Government, which means in favor of the dairymen, in every single case, 

 and those decisions rendered by the Supreme Court have put the National 

 Dairy Union on a stronger footing. 



When we went to Congress asking for a tax of ten cents a pound on 

 oleomargarine, colored in semblance of butter, there was a great deal of 

 doubt in the minds of a good many well informed people as to whether such 

 a law would stand the scrutiny of the Supreme Court of the United States. 

 The law, of course, was denounced by its opponents as class legislation, as 

 the classes against the masses, and as an attempt of one particular class of 

 people to profit at the expense of another class; we were held up as sort of 

 highway robbers; as people who wanted to force the consumers of this 

 country to pay exorbitant prices for their food products, and it was said that 

 such an unjust law could not be upheld by the Supreme Court of the United 

 States. 



Of course, nobody knows what the Suprme Court of the United States is 

 going to do until it has done it. The matter was laid before the court in all 

 its phases. The court decided that the ten cent tax was perfectly constitu- 

 tional; that Congress had the right, in the first place, to tax any commodity 

 any amount that it desired; that the question of what should be taxed and 

 how much it should be taxed was entirely within the jurisdiction of Con- 

 gress, and that the Supreme Court had nothing to do with it. That power 

 was delegated to Congress by the Constitution and to say that Congress did 

 not have that power would be declaring the Constitution unconstitutional. 

 Then, in response to the claim of our opponents that Congress had arbi- 

 trarily misused the constitutional power given it by the Constitution, the 

 Supreme Court answered that even though that be true that Congress had 

 done something which might injure a certain class of people, the fact of it 

 having kept within the bounds of the Constitution took the matter entirely 

 out of the hands of the Supreme Court; and should the Supreme Court set 



