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The effort to legislate on child labor under cover of the power to regulate commerce having failed, recourse was had to the constitutional grant of power to lay taxes. Within six months after the decision of the Supreme Court declaring the act unconstitutional was announced, another statute similar in purpose and effect was enacted as part of a Federal Revenue Act.
However, let him attack. Charmingly, believe me, and with less noise than I had thought, has the wheel of the Republic revolved: more rapidly, anyhow, than it should have done owing to Cato's error, but still more owing to the unconstitutional conduct of those who have neglected the auspices, the Ælian law, the Iunian, the Licinian, the Cæcilian and Didian, who have squandered all the safeguards of the constitution, who have handed over kingdoms as though they were private estates to tetrachs, and immense sums of money to a small coterie.
So they got this first Statute of Laborers through; it required all persons able in body under sixty to do labor to such persons as require labor or else be committed to gaol. That, of course, is compulsory labor; the law would therefore be unconstitutional with us to-day except in so far as it applied, under a criminal statute, in regard to tramps or vagrants.
They contended that it was insufficient, defective, and contradictory; that it was ex parte evidence; that it had been manufactured by ministers; that it was founded chiefly on hearsay, and that the greatest part of it was false; that it had undergone no cross-examination; that it was unconstitutional; and that, if they admitted it, they would establish a dangerous precedent, and abandon their rights.
One State, holding an embargo law unconstitutional, may declare her opinion, and withdraw from the Union. She secedes. Another, forming and expressing the same judgment on a law laying duties on imports, may withdraw also. She secedes.
The ordinance is founded, not on the indefeasible right of resisting acts which are plainly unconstitutional and too oppressive to be endured, but on the strange position that any one State may not only declare an act of Congress void, but prohibit its execution; that they may do this consistently with the Constitution; that the true construction of that instrument permits a State to retain its place in the Union and yet be bound by no other of its laws than those it may choose to consider as constitutional.
That's your Missouri Compromise; but has the North ever considered it so sacred? She's stuck to it when it was good politics, and forgotten it when that was more to her interest. The Supreme Court of the United States will declare the whole Missouri Compromise unconstitutional at no late date. And what it is going to do with Mr. Clay's compromise, of this year, the Lord only knows."
The eight-hour clause in this first factory law met with much less opposition in the Legislature than was anticipated, and was enforced for a year before it was pronounced unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Illinois.
There was a law on the statute book to compel the return of slaves fleeing into the free States, but certain of its provisions had been pronounced unconstitutional, and it was ineffective.
It has really come to this, that the constitutionality of a bank is to depend upon the opinion which one particular man may form of the utility or necessity of some of the clauses in its charter! If that individual chooses to think that a particular power contained in the charter is not necessary to the proper constitution of the bank, then the act is unconstitutional!
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