transcends the authority delegated to Congress over commerce, but also exerts a power as to purely local matter to which the federal authority does not extend. The farreaching effect of upholding the act cannot be more plainly indicated than by pointing out that if Congress can thus regulate matters entrusted to local authority by prohibition of the movements of commodities in interstate commerce, all freedom of commerce will be at an end, and the power of the States over local matters may be eliminated, and thus our system of government be practically destroyed. For these reasons, we hold that this law exceeds the constitutional authority of Congress. In 1918, Congress enacted the Child Labor Tax Law, which provided that every person operating any mine or quarry in which children under 16 have been employed or permitted to work during any part of the taxable year; or any mill, cannery, workship, factory, or manufacturing establishment in the United States in which children under the age of 14 have been employed or permitted to work or children between 14 and 16 have been employed or allowed to work more than eight hours in any day or more than six days in any week or before six A.M. or after seven P.M., shall pay for each taxable year, in addition to all other taxes, an excise tax equivalent to ten per cent of their entire net profits of the year. The validity of this law was challenged by the Drexel Furniture Co., which brought a suit against the collector of internal revenue of North Carolina, to recover an assessment of $6,312.79, which it had paid under protest. In passing upon the issues of the case, Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Co., decided by U. S. Supreme Court, May 15, 1922, Chief Justice Taft said: I Does this law impose a tax with only that incidental restraint and regulation which a tax must inevitably involve? Or does it regulate by the use of the so-called tax as a penalty? If a tax, it is clearly an excise. If it were an excise upon a commodity or other thing of value we might not be permitted, under previous decisions of this court, to infer, solely from its heavy burden, that the act intends a prohibition instead of a tax. But this act is more. It provides a heavy exaction for a departure from a detailed and specified course of conduct in business. That course of business is that employers shall employ in mines and quarries, children of an age greater than sixteen years; in mills and factories children of an age greater than fourteen years; and shall prevent children of an age less than sixteen years from working more than eight hours a day or six days in the week. If an employer departs from this prescribed course of business, he is to pay to the government onetenth of his entire net income in the business for a full year. The amount is not to be proportioned in any degree to the extent or frequency of the departures, but is to be paid by the employer in full measure whether he employs five hundred children for a year, or employs only one for a day. Moreover, if he does not know that the child is within the named age limit, he is not to pay; that is to say, it is only where he knowingly departs from the prescribed course that payment is to be exacted. Scienters [allegations of knowledge] are associated with penalties, not with taxes. The employer's factory is to be subject to inspection at any time not only by the taxing officers of the Treasury, the Department normally charged with the collection of taxes, but also by the Secretary of Labor and his subordinates, whose normal function is the advancement and protection of the welfare of the workers. In the light of these features of the act, a court must be blind not to see that the socalled tax is imposed to stop the employment of children within the age limits prescribed. Its prohibiting and regulatory effect and purpose are palpable. It is the high duty and function of this Court in cases regularly brought to its bar to decline to recognize or enforce seeming laws of Congress, dealing with subjects not entrusted to Congress, but left or committed by the supreme law of the land [Constitution of U. S.] to the control of the States. We cannot avoid the duty even though it require us to refuse to give effect to legislation designed to promote the highest good. The good sought in unconstitutional legislation is an insidious feature because it leads citizens and legislators of good purpose to promote it without thought of the serious breach it will make in the ark of our covenant, or the harm which will come from breaking down recognized standards. In the maintenance of local selfgovernment, on the one hand, and the national power on the other, our country has been able to endure and prosper for near a century and a half. Out of a proper respect for the acts of a co-ordinate branch of the government, this court has gone far to sustain taxing acts as such, even though there has been ground for suspecting from the weight of the tax it was intended to destroy its subject. But in the act before us, the presumption of validity cannot prevail, because the proof of the contrary is found in the very face of its provisions. Grant the validity of this law, and all that Congress would need to do hereafter, in seeking to take over to its control any one of the great number of subjects of public interest, jurisdiction of which the States have never parted with, and which are reserved to them by the 10th Amendment, would be to enact a detailed measure of complete regulation of the subject, and enforce it by a so-called tax upon departures from it. To give such magic to the word "tax" would be to break down all constitutional limitation of the powers of Congress and completely wipe out the sovereignty of the States. The difference between a tax and a penalty is sometimes difficult to define, and yet the consequences of the distinction in the required method of their collection often are important. When the sovereign enacting the law has power to impose both tax and penalty, the difference between revenue production and mere regulation may be immaterial; but not so when one sovereign can impose a tax only, and the power of regulation rests in another. Taxes are occasionally imposed in the discretion of the legislature on proper subjects with the primary motive of obtaining revenue from them, and with the incidental motive of discouraging them by making their continuance impossible. They do not lose their character as taxes because of the incidental motive. of the penalizing features of the so-called tax when it loses its character as such and becomes a mere penalty, with the characteristics of regulation and punishment. Such is the case in the law before us. Although Congress does not invalidate the contract of employment, or expressly declare that the employment within the mentioned ages is illegal, it does exhibit its intent practically to achieve the latter result by adopting the criteria of wrongdoing, and imposing its principal consequence on those who transgress its standard. But there comes a time in the extension CHAPTER XXV CONSTRUCTION AND INTERPRETATION OF STATUTES Application of Statutes. The courts in giving effect to the will of legislatures ascertain the objects and purposes for which statutes have been made from the history of the times when they were enacted and ascertain the meaning of statutes from the words in which they are expressed. They do not take into account the views expressed by individual members in the course of the debates or the motives which influenced their votes, because the statutes speak the will of the majorities that passed them. Thus the rules for the construction and interpretation of statutes are much the same as the rules for the construction and interpretation of constitutions. 2 Construction of Statutes. In the case of Holy Trinity Church v. U. S.,3 decided in 1892, the U. S. Supreme Court construed the act of congress passed in 1885 making unlawful the importation and migration of aliens under contract or agreement to perform labor in the United States, its Territories, and the District of Columbia. This statute 1 Aldridge v. Williams, 3 Howard (U. S.) Rep., 22, 24; U. S. v. Union Pacific R. R. Co., 91 U. S. Rep., 71, 79. 2 See Chapter IX. 3 143 U. S. Rep., 457. |