318 HASTINGS—POLICE POWER OF THE STATE. [June 19, 
_are in cases relating to the commerce clause, and that the case in 
which the phrase originated—Brown vs. Maryland—is such a one, 
does not prevent this being true. The slave power was not fond of 
the courts. The case of Prigg vs. Pennsylvania was, as Judge Story 
remarks, the first in which the provisions of the constitution as 
to fugitives from slavery was involved. The exclusion laws that 
Winthrop was attacking the next year in his Report Vo. 8o, before 
referred to, seldom or never reached courts of last resort. This 
case of Prigg vs. Pennsylvania, itself, was doubtless brought by one 
who was anything but friendly to African slavery and is by Judge 
McLean declared to be an agreed case. 
In the well-known! Lemon case in New York the writ of Habeas 
Corpus was served in 1852, the case reached its final hearing in the 
Court of Appeals only in 1860. It is not surprising that litigants 
should not be eager to take into the last asylums of justice cases in- 
volving the relative rights of slave and owner. The comments of? 
Judge Ruffin in reversing the judgment of conviction for assault on 
a slave by a temporary master who had hired her from her owner, 
show how loath the courts were to take up the subject. The fact that 
no appearance of attorney was made on behalf of the victorious de- 
fendant shows, perhaps, how little inclination there was to debate 
_ in courts of law this institution which rests upon pure force applied 
by one man for his own profit directly upon another. 
The fact that in the United States courts the questions raised are 
concerning commerce or taxation does not prevent their discussion 
being always in the presence of this sometimes smouldering, some- 
times blazing brand of dissension between the states, and both 
argument and decision were with an eye to the consequences in 
that direction. The effect of slavery in thus bringing into prom- 
inence the doctrine of the police power, growing out of the rela- 
tions of the state and federal governments, seems a remarkable 
example of the truth of * Stein’s remark, that developments in con- 
stitutional and administrative law may be looked for precisely when 
some special interest is seeking to arrogate to itself the position of 
being the general public interest. 
1 Lemon vs. People, 20 N. Y., 562. 
2 State vs. Mann, 2@ Dev., 263. 
3 Handbuch Verwaltungs Lehre, S. 120. 
