380 HASTINGS—POLICE POWER OF THE STATE. [June 19, 
the three states required a moderate payment for such license. A 
case of conviction for violation of these laws was brought up from 
each of the states under a finding in each case that the liquors were 
of foreign importation and that the sellers had no license to dispose 
of them. It was not claimed in any of the cases that the seller was 
also the importer, but the right to sell the imported liquor without 
license was claimed. It was also asserted that the laws were an in- 
fringement on the power of Congress to regulate commerce under 
the constitution. 
The difficulty of fixing practical rights in a court which feels 
more strongly than anything else that its mission is to settle the 
relation of discordant states by determining their mutual relation 
to a paramount federal state is in this case exemplified. Truly, 
the foreign observer is not wholly unjustified in his amazement at 
the deliberate creation, as he thinks it was, of such a paradise for 
lawyers. The judges are as satisfied in these cases that the state 
statutes under consideration are good as they were in Prigg vs. 
Pennsylvania that the law was bad. ‘They are all convinced that 
the laws they are considering here are each a valid exercise of the 
police power. The question profoundly discussed, and left as far 
as ever from settlement, is, whether they are also a regulation of 
foreign commerce, and whether the state has any concurrent 
authority with Congress over the latter'subject. The increasing vogue 
of the term ‘‘ police power’’ is noticeable. It is true that Chief 
Justice Taney does not yet quite fully adopt it, even in attempting 
to define, or rather describe, its meaning. After saying that no 
one controverts that the constitution, and laws made pursuant to it, 
are the supreme law of the land, and that consequently the acts of 
Congress must prevail in the domain of interstate and foreign com- 
merce, he adds: 
‘But this power extends no further than such domain and beyond this 
the power of the state is supreme.”’ 
This, he says, is unquestioned, but the ‘‘ trouble lies in the applica- 
tion of it’’—not an uncommon trouble in deciding cases, but in 
this one the difficulty was not so much in making the application as 
in getting the nine judges to agree as to what it was they were 
applying. A discussion seldom settles questions. Courts settle 
them by deciding them. By discussing them they usually raise 
some new ones. 
