1900.] HASTINGS—POLICE POWER OF THE STATE. oho 
sentatives by a vote of eighty-six to fifty-nine without discussion 
on the part of their opponents. Even then few ventured to dis- 
pute the constitutional principles declared in them. However 
this declaration was treated, the ‘‘ Police Power’’ was thence- 
forth to be retained within the jurisprudence as well as in 
the politics of America and under that title. We have seen the 
term ‘Police Power’’ originate in Brown vs. Maryland, and 
brought into currency in the case of New York zs. Miln. Its 
next appearance in the federal Supreme Court, no longer used ten- 
tatively and as a briefer substitute for fuller expressions, is in 
' Prige vs. Pennsylvania in 1842. In this case the Fugitive Slave 
law and the right of a state to legislate on the subject of the rendi- 
tion of fugitive slaves first came before the Supreme Court. It had no 
difficulty in agreeing that the law of Pennsylvania under which the 
plaintiff had been indicted and found guilty of removing a mulatto 
woman by force from Pennsylvania into Maryland was repugnant 
to the acts of Congress on that subject, and therefore void. 
The judges, however, could not agree as to whether Congress 
alone might legislate on this subject, or whether the states also 
might take action to enforce the constitutional right to such rendi- 
tion of fugitive slaves, so long as they did nothing contrary to the 
acts of Congress. Those of the judges who were able to agree 
among themselves on that subject were unable to agree as to why 
they agreed about it, and so, after the fashion which began to pre- 
vail in that court after the death of Chief Justice Marshall, all of 
the judges except two gave separate opinions. 
Judge Story gave the opinion to the court, and after holding in 
terms almost as sweeping as those which were afterward to arouse 
so much indignation in the Dred Scott case that the constitution 
recognized property in slaves, after saying that the right to hold 
slaves and claim their extradition is 
‘‘an absolute and positive right and duty pervading the whole Union 
with an equal and supreme force and uncontrolled and uncontrollable by 
state sovereignty or state legislation,” 
he holds that the maintenance of such right so established by 
national authority is confided solely to Congress as the national 
legislature. Then, as he says, 
2 “to guard against any possible misconstruction”.... ‘‘we are by 
116 .fet., 539 (1842). = 216 Pet., 625. 
