Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 19.pdf/318

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BEVERIDGE CHILD LABOR BILL remains will be held by them as tenants at will. That this is not a regulation of commerce would seem to appear from the fact that it is not commerce, but manufacture and mining, that is regulated. The processes upon which the regulation operates have ended before commerce begins. If there is any distinction at all between production and distribution, and it has always been considered that there is, the power to regu late the latter does not necessarily include the power to regulate the former. It is thus a new doctrine which teaches that because Congress has power to regulate commerce it has power to regulate manu facturing and mining which are parts of production. One would not be surprised if, under its power to regulate commerce, the Federal Government should claim the right to pro hibit interstate carriers from employing children under fourteen years of age. While this would in reality be a police regulation, it would on the face of it be a regulation of commerce. But this is a very different proposition from making the regulation apply to a process which has ended before commerce begins, and calling it a regulation of commerce rather than of manufacture or mining. The Supreme Court of the United States in the case of Gibbons v. Ogden, denned commerce as "intercourse." And in the case of the County of Mobile v. Kim ball, 102 U. S. 691, it supplemented the above general definition with one much more explicit: "Commerce with foreign nations and among the states, strictly con sidered, consists in intercourse and traffic, including in these terms navigation and transportation of persons and property, as well as the purchase, sale, and exchange of commodities." And in the case of Kidd v. Pearson, 128 U. S. 1, it was said that "Manufacture is transportation — the fash ioning of raw material into a change of form for use. The functions of commerce are different. The. buying and selling and the

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transportation incidental thereto consti tute commerce. ... If it be held that the term includes the regulation of all such manufactures as are intended to be the subject of commercial transactions in the future, it is impossible to deny that it would also include all productive industries that contemplate the same thing. Any move ment towards the establishment of rules of production in this vast country, with its many different climates and opportunities, could only be at the sacrifice of the advan tages of a large part of the localities in it, if not of every one of them. A situation more puzzling to the state governments, and more provocative of conflicts between the General Government and the states, and less likely to have been what the framers of the Constitution intended, it would be difficult to imagine." And in United States v. E. C. Knight Co., 156 U. S. 1, the court said: "That which belongs to commerce is within the jurisdiction of the United States, but that which does not belong to commerce is within the jurisdiction of the police power of the state. Commerce succeeds to manufac ture and is not a part of it. The power to regulate commerce is the power to prescribe the rule by which commerce shall be gov erned." It is therefore clear that unless the Supreme Court changes its view as to what constitutes commerce, it would not hold the act we are considering to be a regulation of commerce. May it be sustained as a legitimate exercise of the police power of the Federal Government? We often hear it stated that the Federal Government possesses no police power; that it possesses simply delegated powers and that there is no delegation of police powers. True, no police power, eo nomine, was conferred upon the Federal Government by the framers of the Constitution. The phrase, police power, was not used until forty years after the Constitutional Con vention, it being first used by Chief Justice