CHAPTER II NATIONAL POWER OVER NATIONAL INTERESTS THE monumental and distinctive service rendered by Mr. Hughes in the Supreme Court was in the so-called "State Rate Cases"-an epochal series of controversies which came up from the commonwealths of the Mississippi Valley and South-west and subjected our dual system of State and National sovereignty to the most severe strain and test since the Civil War. To him there was entrusted, not only the prodigious labours of the perusal of an unprecedented quantity of printed records and exhaustive briefs, incident to the examination of the intricate questions of valuation, rates, returns, fixed charges, depreciation, repairs, intangible and physical property, franchises, and the like, on which largely depended the determination of the reasonableness or confiscatory character of hundreds of orders of State Commissions affecting thousands of rates over diverse areas, but also the preparation of opinions which necessarily undertook the task of making concrete, understandable, workable, and consistent, the practical applications of the general principles of State and National authority, hitherto stated in the most general terms in the Federal Constitution and expounded in terminology hardly less general, by Marshall and his successors in the constructive statesmanship of the Supreme Court of an earlier day. There was doubt on the part of many whether it was physically possible that a court, before which issues of great difficulty and public importance were coming day by day, without end and almost without interlude, could in addition perform, in any adequate and acceptable fashion, the task of scrutiny and review of such voluminous records, calling, as each case did, for detailed examination of facts as to the relative adjustments of rates, the income from different classes of traffic, the cost of transportation of the various classes of traffic, and the whole issue of the reasonableness of the returns from the rates as fixed by State authority. As one saw wagon-loads of exhibits brought into hearings before the State Commissions and the Interstate Commerce Commission; as one looked upon the bulky volumes of testimony and formidable libraries of briefs prepared with laborious effort by little armies of specialised counsel; as one saw maps and tariffs piled before special masters and listened to the droning narrative of rate-experts and tariff-men as to the way in which schedules have been built up through the years and the factors necessarily taken into account in even a single community, to say nothing of a State or region, it seemed to many that the decisive challenge to National regulation had come, and that the whole fabric was imperilled by the physical impossibility that a busy court could perform with thoroughness and fidelity to fundamental principles the recurring task of keeping the rivalries of States and sections within the confines of the fair rights of invested property and the paramount interests of the Nation as a whole. Such was the challenge to National regulation of essentially National concerns-should that National control in the National sphere be affirmed, clarified, made effective, or was it now to break down, virtually under the weight and complexity of the demand made upon the Supreme Court? Mr. Hughes was the youngest member of the Court; he had an infinite capacity for patient and assiduous application to facts; he had come from the atmosphere of rate and regulative matters in New York State; upon him devolved no small part of the detail work in the rate cases. The statement may with entire accuracy be made that few men of mature years and ripened experience could have physically performed the task mastered by Justice Hughes between the close of the argument in the Minnesota Rate Cases 1 on April 12, 1912, and the handing down of the remarkable series of opinions which began with the determination of the Minnesota cases on June 9, 1913. His 1230 U. S. Reports, page 352. opinion in the Minnesota case alone covers a hundred pages, many of them compact with closely marshalled facts. From that date until the filing of the opinion in the so-called Shreveport case1 a year later less a day, there was a continuance of the same labours, and opinions were prepared in nine cases involving voluminous printed records, intricate facts, and perhaps the most far-reaching issues ever presented to the Court in a single line of cases. Nor was the answer merely one of the adequate performance of the physical task. For years there had been strain and conflict between State and National authority in many fields, notably that of railroad regulation, because of uncertainty as to the mode of applying concepts almost a century old, to complex conditions which Marshall, Curtis and Storey in no wise anticipated. The task of judicial clarification and definition was an undertaking in constructive statesmanship second perhaps only to that performed by Marshall. It will remain matter for regret to many that the summons to another field of public service led Justice Hughes to leave the Supreme Court with this task of judicial statesmanship splendidly begun, but far from completed. His opinion in the Minnesota Rate Cases and subsequently in the Shreveport case will ever be quoted as chart and compass of the metes and bounds of State and National sovereignty in the regulative field. 1234 U. S. Reports, page 342. These opinions are truly the charter of a vitalised Nationalism. In the Minnesota Rate Cases, there was challenge of the constitutionality of acts of the Minnesota Legislature and the State Railroad and Warehouse Commission, in relation to freight and passenger rates between points wholly within the State. It was asserted, in behalf of the carriers, that the action of the State authorities demanded rates so unremunerative and confiscatory as to place a direct burden upon interstate commerce, accomplish results forbidden by the Interstate Commerce Act, and exceed the permissible limits of State action as to instrumentalities used in interstate commerce, even though the action was in terms addressed only to segments of the use of such instrumentalities exclusively within the State. In the so-called Shreveport case, there was challenge of the dominance of the Federal power over the State power, where it appeared that the State regulative authority had fixed intrastate rates so low and on such a basis, in relation to interstate rates in part through the same territory, as to inflict injury upon interstate commerce and perpetuate results which the Interstate Commerce Commission had expressly found to be discriminatory and violative of the regulative rules declared by Congress as to interstate transportation. The assertion was made that the Federal government |