404 HASTINGS-—POLICE POWER OF THE STATE.  [June19, 
Justice Wayne, in giving the opinion of the court, continues: 
“It is but the exercise of the power which every state is admitted to 
possess of defining offenses and punishing offenders. The power to 
make municipal regulations for the restraint and punishment of crime, 
for the preservation of the health and morals of her citizens and the 
public peace, has never been surrendered by the states, nor restrained 
by the constitution of the United States.’ 
‘‘In the exercise of this power, which has been denominated the 
police power, a state has a right to make it a penal offense to introduce 
paupers, criminals or fugitive slaves within their borders, and punish 
those who thwart this policy by harboring, concealing or secreting such 
persons.” 
That it may help the owner is no objection to such action by the 
state: 
“If a state in the exercise of its legitimate powers should thus indirectly 
benefit the master of a fugitive, no one has a right to complain that it has 
thus far, at least, fulfilled a duty assumed or imposed by its compact as 
a member of the Union.” 
‘That the defendant is thus subject to two punishments, one by the 
state and another by the nation, is not a good objection, as he is subject 
to two sovereignties and his act is a violation of the laws of each and 
therefore constitutes two offenses.”’ 
Here we have the same act of the same person punished by both 
state and nation with a view to vindicate the same right of a master, 
and are asked to religiously refrain from finding the powers exer- 
cised by the two governments similar or concurrent. 
Judge McLean’s dissenting opinion is to the effect that this was 
not an exercise of the police power, for the reason that the control 
of fugitive slaves is ascribed by the national constitution to Con- 
gress and so removed from the domain of police power. He seems 
to have found, though he does not name, a fugitive slave power. 
How the different members of the federal Supreme Court, or 
how Judge Cooley himself, would frame such a ‘true theory’’ of 
the nature of police power as would put this case of Moore ws. 
Illinois within it and Prigg vs. Pennsylvania without it, and all 
with no assistance from express provisions of the constitution, is 
hard to conceive. A state law that forbids harboring a slave is a 
due exercise of the police power. A state law that forbids a mas- 
ter from taking his slave and removing him by force out of the 
commonwealth without the exhibition of some legal process is not. 
