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244 HARVARD LAW REVIEW of the possibility that what caused Mr. Justice Bradley most concern was the cumulation of taxes on the same economic interest, rather than the fact that interstate commerce did not escape entirely from giving sustenance to the states. It shows, too, the recognition that every tax may depend for its justification on the absence of certain other possible taxes. No just solution of the complex problem raised by alleged conflicts between state taxing power and the necessary freedom of interstate commerce can be reached if the state is not required to let its right hand know what its left hand doeth. II From the foregoing review it appears that for two decades the Supreme Court had been allowing states to impose taxes that from an economic standpoint were levied more or less directly on receipts from interstate commerce. In all this time, however, none of the opinions had indicated clearly that the court knew exactly what it was doing and was prepared to support its decisions by accurate and detailed analysis of the economics of the matter. The judges were engaged in the task of finding what subjects of taxation were interstate commerce itself, and what were something else. They assiuned that a tax on a subject not itself interstate commerce could not be a regulation of that commerce; and they were prone to indulge in nominalism and conceptualism in finding what was the subject taxed. In State Tax on Railway Gross Receipts *^ and in Osborne v. Mobile,^'^ they took positions that they later aban- doned.^^ They seemed to be feeling their way in the dark. From 1894 on, however, the issues are more clearly recognized and more adequately discussed. In Cleveland, C, C.b'St. L. R. Co. v. Backus, ^^ Mr. Justice Brewer leaves no doubt as to what the majority of the court think about the propriety of assessing railroad property so as to include the value of the interstate commerce in which the road is engaged. This case and a companion one^^ had to do with Indiana statutes « Note 18, supra. "o j6 WaU. (U. S.) 479 (1872). " The former in Philadelphia & Southern Mail S. S. Co. v. Pennsylvania, note 20, supra; the latter in Leloup v. Mobile, 127 U. S. 640, 8 Sup. Ct. Rep. 1380 (1888). '* 154 U. S. 439, 14 Sup. Ct. Rep. 1122 (1894). » Pittsburgh, C. C. & St. L. Ry. Co. v. Backus, 154 U. S. 421, 14 Sup. Ct. Rep. 1114 (1894).