1900.] HASTINGS—POLICE POWER OF THE STATE. yal 
pretense of guarding the public health, the public morals, or the public 
safety, should invade the rights of life, liberty or property, or other 
right secured by the supreme law of the land.” 
Justice Field’s dissenting opinion does not quite do justice to the 
position of the court in saying that the constitutionality of this 
legislation is rested solely on the fact that it pleased the legislature 
to pass it. 
It is rested also on the fact that in the judgment of the court 
oleomargarine might be and perhaps generally was both dangerous 
and fraudulent, and the defendant had only offered to show the 
contrary as to his own article. To be sure, it would be very diffi- 
cult for Powell to show that frauds and unwholesome compounds 
did not prevail outside of his factory, and the requirement of proof 
of such a negative does amount practically to an affirmation of any- 
thing the legislature might do, and would seem to furnish ground 
for Justice Field’s complaint that this law missed the distinction 
between prohibition and regulation. It prohibits wholesome and 
undisguised manufacture as distinctly as it does the dangerous and 
fraudulent. 
The doctrine in *Yick Wo vs. Hopkins that a police law affecting 
property values must be reasonable as a regulation might, it would 
seem, have been invoked here, and the case of ?People vs. Marx, 
which reached a diametrically opposite conclusion, followed. We 
shall see this law and the interstate clause of the constitution 
arrayed against each other presently with different results. 
In the matter of railroad regulation, we have seen in the case of 
3Wabash, St. L. & P. Ry. Co. ws. Illinois greater stringency in 
applying to state legislation the limitations imposed by federal 
supremacy as compared with that shown in the Granger cases in 
applying the constitutional provisions as to the rights of property 
owners. The greater strenuousness of the court in defending 
the sovereignty of the central government than in defending 
individual or property rights has been often commented upon. 
There seems to be something of such a contrast. The reason is 
doubtless to be sought in the fact that in applying the federal 
restrictions the court is following a new path, and has no guide but 
the language of the constitution and the fact, remarked by Chief 
11178 U. S., 356 (1886), 299 NV. V., 377 (1885). 
SHH (Cb Sis (SiSi7/c 
