1900. ] HASTINGS—POLICE POWER OF THE STATE. 449 
We shall see in following the decisions of-our federal Supreme 
Court in the exercise of its negative upon state legislation given it 
by the fourteenth amendment, that it has not been niggardly in 
allowing room for the police power. With the consciousness of 
unity and of common national interests ever growing stronger and 
at the same time with ever-increasing knowledge of the endless di- 
versity of local requirements, it could not be otherwise. We shall 
find the authority of the states generally maintained where not pal- 
pably in violation of the inhibitions of the fourteenth amendment, 
and a considerable latitude of indulgence to what seem almost 
plain cases of pretense of police objects when the real purpose 
was the effecting of some discrimination against interests or 
persons. 
The decisions of the states do not become unimportant. For 
one thing, if they hold a state law bad, the federal inhibition 
being only on states, there is no power of review, and the deci- 
sion is final so far as that act is concerned. 
Whatever trimming the state courts exercise upon the acts of 
their own legislatures remains lopped off. Of what is left, the 
federal Supreme Court takes cognizance if it is claimed to violate the 
provisions of the federal constitution. So, through the influence 
largely of the fourteenth amendment, partly also of the increasing 
importance of the commerce clause in the constitution as com- 
merce more and more disregards state lines, the federal Supreme 
Court has become the final tribunal for this country where the 
claims of individual liberty and of property and commercial rights 
are heard. 
Starting, as we have seen, with the Slaughter-house cases, the 
whole field of the police power, as it has been developed in the 
twenty-six years since by state legislation, has been reviewed. So 
the national struggle with slavery and sectionalism, that forced 
the term “‘ police power’’ into general use, finally made of the fed- 
eral Supreme Court, where it originated, the chief field for its 
exploitation. Truly, the ‘‘active life of the state is the law- 
making power.’’ It is the glory of Judge Miller, as it was of 
Redfield and Shaw and Chief Justice Marshall before him, that 
he recognized clearly both the needs of such life in the way of 
fresh applications of law and the limits of such need. 
