1900.] HASTINGS—POLICE POWER OF THE STATE. 401 
commerce clause of the federal constitution. The attempt to 
regulate foreign commerce, and the following for that purpose of 
imported articles within the boundaries of the states, inevitably 
brought the federal government in contact with state government 
endeavoring to do the same thing in the exercise of their local 
power. 
It seems clear enough that the ‘‘commerce power,’’ as Justice 
Woodbury calls it, the ‘‘commercial power,’’ as Justice McLean 
termed it and as it has often since been denominated in the 
Supreme Court, and this police power of the state are not distin- 
guishable in their nature. It can hardly be a mysterious something 
in the federal government, called commercial power, which con- 
trols and regulates the sale and handling of an article that has 
come from Paris into an interior town of one of the states, and 
another equally mysterious something of a different and wholly 
distinguishable nature, called the police power of a state, which 
controls a like sale of a wholly similar article by the same indi- 
viduals in the same place and to the same person when it happens 
to come from the next town, instead of from France. Is the diffi- 
culty of adjusting the exercise by two sovereignties of their powers 
in such juxtaposition likely to be increased or diminished by earn- 
estly declaring that they are totally distinct in their nature and, if 
properly conceived, cannot come in conflict? The famous conun- 
drum as to the number of legs the sheep has if you call the tail a 
leg may be inverted. It is just as difficult to make a tail out of a 
leg by calling it such as it is to reverse the process. There must, 
too, in the nature of things, be constant openings for conflict in 
the fact that the power of the general government is over the im- 
ported property as an article of commerce and the sovereignty of 
the state, with its duty to guard the public safety, health, morals 
and welfare, extends, in any possible view, to all the other things 
and persons that surround and deal with such imported articles. 
Commerce and trade arise only by reason of local things and per- 
sons assuming direct relations with such imported articles. The 
state in acting upon such local things and persons while they are 
in such commercial relations with imports must affect, and may 
prevent, such commerce. How, then, can such commerce be ex- 
clusively regulated by Congress? What is there which can be 
governed and controlled by two forces at once both independent 
and exclusive of each other. 
