The SPEAKER. The House resumes the consideration of the special order, which is the bill (H. R. 5461) to establish a board of commissioners of interstate commerce, and to regulate such commerce, on which the gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. BARKSDALE] was entitled to the floor.

Mr. BARKSDALE. Mr. Speaker, in the exercise of his constitutional functions to recommend to Congress such measures as he may deem necessary and expedient, the President in his annual message of December 4, 1883, directed attention to the necessity of legislation to protect the public from acts of injustice and oppression committed by railroad corporations employed as the agents of commerce among the States. He used this strong and unequivocal language:

Complaints have lately been numerous and urgent that certain corporations, controlling in whole or in part the facilities for the interstate carriage of persons and merchandise over the great railroads of the country, have resorted in their dealings with the public to divers measures unjust and oppressive in their character.

In some instances the State governments have attacked and suppressed these evils, but in others they have been unable to afford adequate relief because of the jurisdictional limitations which are imposed upon them by the Federal Constitution.

The question how far the National Government may lawfully interfere in the premises, and what, if any, supervision or control it ought to exercise, is one which merits your careful consideration.

While we cannot fail to recognize the importance of the vast railway systems of the country and their great and beneficent influences upon the development of our material wealth, we should, on the other hand, remember that no individual and no corporation ought to be invested with absolute power over the interest of any other citizen or class of citizens. The right of these railway corporations to a fair and profitable return upon their investments, and to reasonable freedom in their regulations, must be recognized; but it seems only just that, so far as its constitutional authority will permit, Congress should protect the people at large in their interstate traffic against acts of injustice which the State governments are powerless to prevent.

The same recommendation is renewed in general terms by the President in his annual message of December 1, 1884.

It is proper to assume that the President did not act without due deliberation, and that he would not have called the attention of Congress to the subject in the earnest and vigorous language he has employed, if the necessity for the legislation he proposes had not been urgent. The recommendation emanates from the executive head of the Government, and though he is the recognized chief of the political party to which he owes his elevation, the measure can not be considered from a partisan standpoint to bias the minds and pervert the judgment of those whose duty it is to deal with it. It must be regarded from the higher plane of enlightened public policy unaffected by the narrow considerations of party. We have seen in the progress of the discussion that it is common ground upon which the North and the South, the East and the West, can meet; a domain into which the intolerant spirit of party and the still more illiberal spirit of sectionalism can not enter.

CONSTITUTIONAL power of coNGRESS TO REGULATE INTERSTATE COMMERCE.

The question first to be settled in providing the remedial legislation for the acts of oppression and injustice referred to by the President, is

whether it is within the scope of the duties confided to Congress by the Constitution. I will address myself the more readily to this point in view of the thorough and elaborate examination which other members who have preceded me in the discussion have made of the details and practical effect of the pending bills. The language of the Constitution is so plain, and the weight of judicial authority in favor of the right of Congress to exercise whatever power is needed for the regulation of commerce among the States is so overwhelming that no loop exists to hang a doubt upon. It is that "Congress shall have power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes." It is a historical fact that the predominant motive which induced the States to meet in convention "to frame a more perfect union" than existed under the Confederation was to regulate commerce among them and to place it under the protection of a uniform law. During the Confederation the States, each for itself, could regulate commerce and there was constant peril of a conflict of jurisdiction.

It is significant that in the resolution of Virginia urging the assembling of the convention this was the chief object mentioned. Therefore the real intent of the clause of the Constitution "to regulate commerce among the States" can not be questioned. The design of the framers of the instrument is its true interpreter.

The line of judicial authority in support of the power to do what the President has so wisely and well recommended is unbroken from the earlier days of the Government down to the present time. It would be a work of supererogation to cite the authorities in support of the proposition if the power of Congress to do what he has advised had not been denied by the accredited attorneys and representatives of the corporations which are proposed to be placed under the wholesome restraints of law. In his argument before the Committee on Commerce a learned attorney, who announced himself as the accredited representative of over 6,000 miles of railroad, with a capital of more than $100,000,000, denied that the question had ever been judicially decided. He said:

What I maintain is that there has been no case before the Supreme Court of the United States in which the issue has been plainly and distinctly marked as to what the power of Congress is.

Another representative of the corporations, in his argument before the committee, with apparent sincerity, insisted that the power of Congress to regulate commerce was restricted to the navigable waters. He said:

That commerce among the States is necessarily a thing that floats upon the navigable waters, those highways that have their sources in one State and their waters in another, and which are boundaries between the different States, and which, if we had not the different States, would have been regulated by treaties among the several States as independent sovereignties. Commerce is commerce continued upon waters that are not within States, but on water ways that are upon no State.

In a colloquy with the chairman of the committee he expressed himself in this emphatic language:

The CHAIRMAN. Is it your understanding that Congress has no power to regulate the commerce or passenger traffic over the railroads from State to State? Mr. SELLERS. Yes, sir; they have none whatever.

If these positions be correct, the Government is a failure in one of the main objects of its creation. The Constitution is a dead letter-a nullity-in one of its essential provisions. The corporations annually transporting products valued at not less than $15,000,000,000 are with

out control; they are a law unto themselves, and have as large a charter to impose whatever burdens their cupidity may suggest upon the labor and business of the country as the winds to blow where they listeth. If they are hedged by the divinity ascribed to them by their devotees the figure of speech employed by a New England statesman now no more has been verified, that they are like the barons of the feudal ages in their rocky fastnesses, levying tribute upon all the wayfarers of business and pleasure and duty, with none to molest or to make them afraid.

Judge Redfield, in his excellent work on the law of railroads, has this to say in refutation of this monstrous doctrine:

Those who assume that Congress has no power to regulate the traffic on these extended lines of railway, reaching from one end of the Union to the other, must, if they would meet the question fairly, either say the extended lines of railway, amounting to many millions annually, probably ten times as much as the entire commerce of the country at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, is not commerce at all, or if it be is not subject to any regulation or control whatever; for it is certain the States have neither the power nor capacity to regulate to any purpose or with any efficiency the interstate traffic. It must then come under the control of Congress or be left to its own devices and impulses-an experiment never tried in any other country. (Redfield on Railways, 720-722.)

The power of Congress to regulate commerce between the States by whatever agents carried on was asserted by the highest judicial tribunal of the United States, speaking through its greatest authority, ChiefJustice Marshall, in the celebrated case of Gibbons vs. Ogden. The Legislature of New York had granted to certain parties the exclusive navigation of all the waters within the jurisdiction of the State, with boats moved by fire or steam, for a term of years. Thomas Gibbons undertook to employ boats on the waters to the use of which the monopoly had been granted. Ogden, the chief beneficiary, prayed an injunction to restrain him from navigating them. The courts of New York decided to perpetuate the injunction. The case was brought before the Supreme Court, and it reversed the decision on the ground that the act was repugnant to the clause of the Constitution which authorizes Congress to regulate commerce, so far as the said act prohibits vessels licensed according to the laws of the United States for carrying on the coasting trade from navigating the said waters.

Chief-Justice Marshall, in delivering the opinion of the court, after declaring that "the genius and character of the whole Government seemed to be that its action is to be applied to all the external concerns which affect the States generally, but not to those which are completely within a particular State," said:

The power to regulate commerce among the States is "to prescribe the rule by which commerce is to be governed." This power, like others vested in Congress, is complete in itself, may be exercised to its utmost extent, and acknowledges no limitations other than are prescribed in the Constitution. If, as has always been understood, the sovereignty of Congress, though limited to specified objects, is plenary as to those objects, the power over commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, is vested in Congress as absolutely as it would be in a single government, having in its constitution the same restrictions on the exercise of the power as are found in the Constitution of the United States. (Gibbons vs. Ogden, 9 Wheaton.)

The court declared further:

Where each government exercises the power of taxation, neither is exercising the power of the other; but when a State proceeds to regulate commerce with foreign nations, or among the several States, it is exercising the very power that is granted to Congress, and is doing the very thing which Congress is authorized to do.

Chief-Justice Story, in the case of New York vs. Miln, 11 Peters, 156, citing the foregoing decision, said:

From that time to the present the question has been considered at rest. The power given to Congress to regulate commerce with foreign nations and among the States has been deemed exclusive, from the nature and object of the power, and the necessary implications growing out of it.

This decision pronounced by Chief-Justice Marshall sixty years ago is a monument to his memory more lasting than marble. It has been accepted by all his successors in his great office as the true interpretation of the Constitution. It has stood in all the vicissitudes through which the country has passed, like a guiding pharos in a stormy sea, lighting up the pathway of the mariner amid rocks and shoals and quicksands and whirlpools to a port of safety. Since it was promulgated the country has taken a vast stride in the march of events. The agencies for the transportation of products have been increased; the railroad and the telegraph era has been inaugurated. But the doctrine is applicable to every vehicle of interstate commerce, whatever it may be. The power was conferred for the wise and beneficent purpose of protecting the labor of the country from extortion; of producing harmony among the States; of cementing the bond of their union; and it is exercisable wherever and in whatever fashion the instrumentalities of interstate commerce exist.

Daniel Webster, to whose name has attached the title of the great expounder of the Constitution, in his argument in the same case, held that "the power of Congress to regulate commerce among the States was complete and entire, and to a certain extent necessarily exclusive." He asked: "What is to be regulated? Not the commerce of the several States respectively, but the commerce of the United States. Henceforth" (from and after the adoption of the Constitution), he said, "the commerce of the States was to be an unit, and the system by which it is to exist and be governed must necessarily be complete, entire, and uniform. Its character is to be described by the flag which waves over it-E Pluribus Unum." It was with reference to this masterly exposition of the Constitution that Justice Wayne, addressing its author, said:

The court felt the force and effect of your reasoning and rendered a decision which has released every river and bayou, and lake and harbor, from the influence of monopoly.

Again, in the celebrated Passenger Cases (7 Howard) growing out of the acts of the New York and Massachusetts Legislatures authorizing the collection of toll from passengers arriving at ports within these States, under the general denomination of health laws, the question of the power of Congress was raised. The tax was resisted on the ground that the statute was a regulation of commerce and therefore in conflict with the Constitution of the United States. The State courts affirmed the constitutionality of the law, and it was brought before the Supreme Court of the United States.

Justice McLean, in reversing the judgment of the State courts, cited the decision of Chief-Justice Marshall above quoted and numerous other decisions in support of the doctrine of the exclusive power of Congress to regulate commerce among the several States, and used this pointed language:

If these decisions are not to be taken as the established construction of the Constitution, I know of none which are not yet open to doubt.

And Justice Wayne adds:

Keeping then in mind what commerce is, and how far a nation may legally adjust her own commercial transactions with another State, we cannot be at a loss to determine from the subject-matter of the clause in the Constitution that the meaning of the terms used in it is to exclude the State from regulating commerce in any way, except their own internal trade, and to confide its regulation completely and entirely to Congress.

In the Passenger Case, Norris vs. Boston, Chief-Justice Taney says: It has always been admitted in the discussion upon article 8, section 3, of the Constitution that the power to regulate commerce includes navigation, and ship and crews, because they are the ordinary means of commercial intercourse. In the same cases Justice Daniel said:

The power to regulate commerce includes the regulation of the vessel as well as the cargo, and the manner of using the vessel.

The celebrated case (13 Howard) of the State of Pennsylvania vs. The Wheeling Bridge Company, is directly in point. The bridge had been constructed under an act of the Virginia Legislature. The State of Pennsylvania undertook to enjoin the construction of the bridge, on the ground that it interfered with the free navigation of a navigable stream and inflicted a serious injury upon her citizens. Pending the trial of the case Congress passed an act declaring the bridge a lawful structure. The Supreme Court decided that the act of Congress was a legitimate exercise of the power conferred upon it to regulate commerce among the States. Justice McLean, in delivering the judgment of the

court, said:

The regulation of commerce includes intercourse and navigation, and of course the power to determine what shall or shall not be deemed, in judgment of law, an obstruction to navigation.

Justice Daniel, in coinciding with the decision of the court, expressed himself in this strong language:

Congress have by statute undertaken to regulate the commerce upon the Ohio River, so far as the matters in this controversy are concerned. And who shall question their power to do this? Does it belong to this court under any article or clause of the Constitution or of any statute to assume such a superiority? * They have regulated this matter upon a scale by them conceived to be just and impartial with reference to that commerce which pursues the course of the river, and to that which traverses its channel and is broadly diffused through the country. *

In what has been done by Congress I can have no doubt that they have acted wisely, justly, and strictly within their constitutional competency.

In Brown vs. State of Maryland the court held:

It is not therefore matter of surprise that the commercial grant of power should be as extensive as the mischief, and should comprehend all foreign commerce and all commerce among the States. (12 Peters, 446.)

And further the court said:

The question was considered in the case of Gibbons vs. Ogden, in which the power was declared to be complete in itself and to acknowledge no limitations.

Pierce, in his excellent work on the Law of Railroads, cites the following as a case in which Congress has exercised its power to regulate commerce carried on among the States by railroads:

The act of June 5, 1866, United States Revised Statutes, section 5258, authorizes every railroad company in the United States to carry passengers, troops, government supplies, mails, freight, and property on their way from any State to another State, and to connect with roads of other States, so as to form continuous lines of transportation therein. (Pierce on Railroads, 471.)

The following act, regulating the transportation of live-stock on rail