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The Green Bag
made a distinction between "matters national" and "matters of local inter est," holding that the latter are subject to regulation by the states in the absence of federal legislation. Another decision bearing upon the subject was rendered much earlier in Brown v. Mary land,* wherein Chief Justice Marshall said: "The power to regulate interstate commerce is co-extensive with the subject on which it acts, and cannot be stopped at the external boundary of a state, but must enter its interior." How far into the interior? Obviously not so far as to render the federal police power co-extensive with that of the state. However vaguely defined the limits of federal jurisdiction, the Supreme Court cannot repudiate the principle underlying the remark in Gibbons v. Ogden* repeated in the Employer's Lia bility cases,' that the power of the federal Government does not extend to "that commerce which is completely internal, which is carried on between man and man in a state, or between different parts of the same state, and which does not extend to or affect other states." The upshot seems to be that carefully drawn statutes of the states, relating to such subjects as taxation of corporate property within the state, labor disputes, and the public health, need not clash with federal laws incorpo rating and regulating interstate com panies. Just what powers the states would retain over federal corporations is a problem which raises numerous consti tutional questions. However these ques tions will be ultimately decided, the states must adequately protect their own interests by suitable laws unless our form of government is to undergo •12 Wheat. 419. 440-7. «9 Wheat. 1. 194. •207 U. S. 463. 493.
a radical transformation. And such state legislation kept rigidly within bounds by federal authority need not be detrimental to the interests of federal corporations, which should be able to look to the national authority for ade quate protection from unreasonable in terferences and variegated restrictions.
VERBOSE INDICTMENTS IT was De Quincey, we believe, who wrote of murder as a fine art; the United States too often treats it as a sport. In almost every state in the Union an indictment for murder con tains words enough to fill a column of an ordinary-sized newspaper, and sound like the ravings of a lunatic. Here is an example: "That the said A. B C. a certain pistol then and there charged with gun powder and leaden bullets, which said pistol he, the said A. B. C., then and there in his right hand had and held, then and there unlawfully, purposely, and of deliberate and premeditated malice, did discharge and shoot off to, against, and upon the said D. C., with the intent aforesaid, out of the pistol aforesaid by the force of the gunpowder aforesaid, by the said A. B. C., with the leaden bullets aforesaid, out of the pistol aforesaid, then and there shot off and discharged as aforesaid, him, the said D. C., in and upon the upper right side of the back of him, the said D. C., then and there. . ." The example is genuine, and is not quite as meaningless as it looks. It expresses, in part, the sporting theory of justice, which turns a murder trial into a game of skill between opposing lawyers. The slightest variation from statutory form loses the game, and no fact is better known than the fact that
