passed with the intention of regulating foreign or interstate commerce may nevertheless be a regulation of such commerce, if it operates to impose restrictions upon foreign or interstate commerce which, in the opinion of the Court, are unreasonable. Still, it is by no means certain that these cases can be regarded as establishing any such general principle. While the decision of the Court in Railroad v. Huesen appears to go upon the “unreasonableness” of the provisions of the law, there is language in the opinion which would seem to indicate that the Court thought that the law was passed for the purpose of discriminating against the cattle of other States. Thus the Court say: “The object and the effect of the statute are, therefore, to obstruct interstate commerce, and to discriminate between the property of citizens of one State and that of citizens of other States.” In this view the decision would rest on the same principle as Welton v. State of Missouri, 91 U. S. 275. As to the cases of Hull v. De Cuir, 95 U. S. 485, and Wabash, St. Louis, & Pacific Railway Co. v. Illinois, 118 U.S. 557, it is not clear that they cannot be explained consistently with the principle that an intention to regulate foreign or interstate commerce is necessary to constitute a law or regulation of such commerce. In those cases the laws in question were no doubt regulations of commerce. They purported to be regulations of domestic commerce only; but when we come to consider the nature of the regulations, we see that if applied to that part of interstate transportation taking place within the State, they must almost necessarily operate extraterritorially. The effect of the law of Louisiana requiring carriers engaged in carrying passengers within the limits of the State to furnish the same accommodations to black and white passengers, so far as it applied to carriers doing an interstate business, would almost necessarily be to compel them to furnish the same accommodations to them throughout the entire trip, for the carrier could not conveniently change the accommodations during the trip; and if Louisiana required the same accommodations to be furnished blacks and whites within the State, he would practically be compelled, in the absence of conflicting legislation in the other States, to furnish them the same accommodations throughout the entire trip. As this effect of the law is so obvious, is it not to be deemed that one of the purposes for which the law was enacted was to accomplish this effect? The case of Wabash, St. Louis, & Pacific Railway Co. v. Illinois is capable of a similar explanation. The
