449 HASTINGS—POLICE POWER OF THE STATE. [June 19, 
void an act of Congress providing for the punishment of persons 
mixing and selling certain dangerous inflammable oils; and the 
License Tax cases being a holding that Congress has no such power, 
and that payment of a United States license tax procures no right 
to carry on in a state a business which that state forbids. 
Judge Miller thought the Louisiana statute under consideration 
well calculated to regulate and bring under proper control the 
business in question, and he cites the precedents in English legisla- 
tion and decisions. He finds that the famous case against 
monopolies, reported by * Coke, was a struggle against the power 
of the crown, and not against parliamentary legislation, and that 
if restraints are to be put on such legislation in this country they 
must be found in state or federal constitutions, and, so far as 
federal courts are concerned, in the latter. 
The claim of the plaintiff was that the Louisiana act involved the 
creation of an involuntary servitude contrary to the thirteenth 
amendment; that it abridged the, privileges and immunities of 
citizens of the United States; that it denied them the equal pro- 
tection of the laws, and deprived them of property without due 
process of law, all in violation of the fourteenth amendment. 
It was evident that these amendments might be so interpreted as to 
leave the states the ‘‘ mere shell of legislative power.’’ ‘The 
thirteenth amendment, Judge Miller finds, simply intended to abol- 
ish negro slavery and all other forms of that evil and place it be- 
yond resurrection. The institution, he said, perished of the 
bitterness of the conflict itself had caused, and even before Presi- 
dent Lincoln’s proclamation was at an end almost universally 
within our army lines. He declines to take the simple and there- 
fore impressive declaration in our fundamental law of this great 
fact from its purpose and apply it to what are known as servitudes 
of property in the common law, with which it had no relation. 
“The process of restoring to their proper relations with the federal 
government, and with the other states, those which had sided with the 
rebellion, undertaken under the proclamation of President Johnson in 
1865 and before the assembling of Congress, developed the fact that not- 
withstanding the formal recognition by those states of the abolition of 
slavery, the condition of the slave race would, without further protection 
of the government, be almost as bad as before. Among the first acts of 
legislation adopted by several of the states in the legislative bodies which 
171 Rep., 85. 
