1900.1 HASTINGS—POLICE POWER OF THE STATE. 439 
: CHAP THES VIL 
THE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS AND THE SLAUGHTER-HOUSE 
CASES. 
As has been suggested there was scarcely any development of our 
subject during the civil war. Immediately after it sprang up the 
great questions as to the status of the lately revolted portions of 
the country and its people. The assertion of authority on the 
part of the federal government had become habitual and easy, but 
as soon as legislative action was resumed at the south it was 
found that it was in the hands of those persons lately in rebellion. 
The results were unsatisfactory. Indeed, at that time pretty much 
anything they could have done would have been unsatisfactory to 
the dominant sentiment at the north, whose real grievance was not 
so much at their manner of exercising power, as at the fact of 
their having it to exercise. 
1« The law derives its contents, not out of the development of the legal 
idea, but out of the needs of life which call for it. This life is, there- 
fore, the law-making force” (Rechtsbildende Kraft). 
The life of the state was to give a new form to the federal consti- 
tution, first, by the thirteenth amendment declared adopted in 
December, 1865, that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude 
except as a punishment for crime should exist under the juris- 
diction of the United States. A few months showed that the 
return of the seceded states was not going to be the simple thing 
that President Lincoln had hoped for and President Johnson in- 
sisted it must be. Northern public opinion or, perhaps, more 
accurately northern political sentiment, would not do without what 
its leaders denominated ‘‘a substantial guarantee of the fruits of 
the war.’’ The reconstruction committee of the two houses of 
Congress, therefore, while several of the states were still practi- 
cally under military government, brought forward and procured 
Congress to propose the fourteenth amendment, which was declared 
1 Stein’s Handbuch der Verwaltungs lehre,S. 41. 
PROC. AMER. PHILOS. SOC. XXXIX. 163. Cc. PRINTED SEPT. 27, 1900. 
