1900.] HASTINGS—POLICE POWER OF THE STATE. 455 
road Company vs. Fuller were in each case an attack upon a law 
of many years’ standing and one making what the courts styled 
a ‘‘reasonable regulation.’’ Judge Bradley held until his death to 
the position that the establishing of rates for railroad transportation 
was not a regulation of interstate commerce, even as applied to 
traffic going beyond the state, and that the amounts of such rates 
was a wholly legislative question with which courts had nothing to 
do. The maintenance of such a position together with the one that 
subsequently became established, that the roads must do business 
and accommodate the public or forfeit their franchises and have 
their lines condemned, seems very difficult, and Judge Bradley and 
those whom we shall find holding with him in this matter seem 
never to have offered any reconciliation of the two. 
In 1875 the case of * Welton vs. State of Missouri raised the 
question of the validity of a statute which provided that any one 
selling or handling anything 
“not the produce of this state, other than books, charts, maps and sta- 
tionery,”’ 
should be deemed a peddler and required to pay a license, no 
license being required of those selling produce of the state. A 
sewing-machine seller named Welton, whose’ machines were made 
outside of the state, was fined $50, and after his case had been 
affirmed by the state Supreme Court, appealed it to the one at | 
Washington. 
It was attempted to sustain the law by the argument that the 
state could tax its own citizens in any way it pleased, and could put 
aliens on an equality by a like tax on them. It was also claimed 
to be a mere regulating or police license on a special occupation. 
Judge Field in giving the opinion of the court declined to regard 
as serious the claim of police power. He regarded the law as 
simply an attempt to derive a revenue from foreign goods and quite 
unconstitutional. 
2 
> «Tt would be premature to state any rule, which would attempt to be 
universal in its application, to determine when the commercial power of 
the government of a commodity has ceased and the power of the state 
has commenced. It is sufficient to hold now that the commercial power 
continues until the commodity has ceased to be the subject of discrim- 
inating legislation by reason of its foreign character; that power protects 
Well (OE Son ey fs aE, Ae 
PROC. AMER. PHILOS. SOC. XXXIxX. 168. DD. PRINTED SEPT. 27, 1900. 
