what is necessary, or even appropriate for this purpose, as to be wholly without any sound definition of the right under which it is supposed to be justified.”
These dicta appear to point in favor of the view above stated. Some decisions, too, seem to point the same way. Thus, in Railroad Co. v. Huesen, 95 U. S. 465, a State law prohibiting the importation into the State of Spanish, Mexican, or Indian cattle from the first of March to the first of November of each year, apparently passed for the sole purpose of protecting the State from the infections of a cattle disease known as Texas fever, was held unconstitutional as a regulation of interstate commerce, apparently because the Court thought the restrictions upon such commerce were unreasonably severe,—severer than was necessary for accomplishing the purposes of the act. So the case of Hall v. De Cuir, 95 U. S. 485, appears to lend support to the view above stated. In that case the constitutionality of a State law requiring all common carriers, while carrying passengers within the limits of the State, to furnish the same accommodations to white and colored passengers, was held unconstitutional as a regulation of interstate and foreign commerce. The decision is not based upon any general reasoning. One reason that was urged by the Court against the validity of the law was the inconvenience which such laws might cause to carriers doing an interstate business. For if one State might require the same accommodations to be furnished to whites and blacks, an adjoining State might require that separate accommodations be furnished them, so that a carrier might be required to change his accommodations for passengers every time he crossed a State line. All that a State could reasonably do to protect the rights of black passengers was to require that equally good accommodation be furnished to whites and blacks. A precisely similar line of reasoning was employed in the case of the Wabash, St. Louis, & Pacific Railway Co. v. Illinois, 118 U. S. 557, where a State long-and-short-hau law was held unconstitutional as a regulation of interstate commerce, in as far as it applied to transportation within the State, which was a part of interstate transportation, on the ground that it was a regulation of interstate commerce.
This argument from inconvenience would have no validity upon the theory that an intention to regulate foreign or interstate commerce is necessary to constitute a law a regulation of such commerce. It can avail only upon the theory that a law not
