Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/100

66 HARVARD LAW REVIEW termine the commodities and conditions of interstate commerce, — what to encourage and what *to prohibit. The resulting commer- cial anarchy was intolerable. The defect consisted not alone in the prohibitions by the states of importation of commodities from other states. The want of a single controlling authority to take into account the commercial interests of the entire people was strongly felt. The individual states had attempted to deal with the British trade restrictions which began in 1783 to exclude American merchandise from the West Indies. Massachusetts enacted a retaliatory embargo.^' As other states saw in this only a means of attracting British shipping to their own ports, the act was repealed by Act of July 5, 1786,^* which recited: "Whereas, the good intentions of an act . . . are rendered inefficacious, for want of a cooperation of our sister States ..." The evil of British trade restrictions could not be met because some of the states by inaction made uniformity of regulation impossible.^ The history of the trade convention at Annapolis, leading to the constitutional convention of 1787, is famihar. As was stated by the Chief Justice in Brown v. Maryland,^ no one cause was more operative in the creation of the present constitutional system than the depressed state of commerce during the Confederation, and the deep general conviction that interstate commerce should be subject to single unified control. It was the essence of the system creatbd that the rules governing the transportation of commodi- ties across state lines should not be made by the states with the view to the industry of each particular state but by a single national legislature with the view to the interests of the nation as a whole. In the conventions of the states called to ratify the Constitution of 1787 the dread was repeatedly expressed by Patrick Henry and others that if the powers delegated to Congress were exercised to the utmost the states would be practically wiped out of existence. Those who favored the new Constitution did not answer that the powers were not granted. The reply was that since the national legislature would be composed of representatives coming from " Act of June 23, 1785, Laws and Resolves of Massachusetts, 1784-85, 439. " Laws and Resolves of Massachusetts, 1786-87, 36. ^' S Elliott's Debates, 113, 119. '• Supra, note 33.