EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT ment and will be taken up in the article which is to follow." The reasons for the first proposition are summed up by the author as follows: "We have, then, this situation — the courts exercising a power which its greatest expounder considered an implied one and which is denied to the courts in almost every other nation of the earth. It is not meant here, on that account, to question the right or even its expediency, for our co-ordination of departments and division of powers be tween the state and federal governments ne cessitate its exercise by the federal judiciary; but it is desired here to lay stress on the fact that it is an extraordinary power, that it is widely different from the right of interpreting private delegations of powers, and that the reasons which operate with other countries to deny the right altogether, operate with us also to make the rules of interpretation laid down in the one case inapplicable in the other. "The maxims that ye cannot serve two masters, that the house divided agains itself will fall, that authority is indivisible, and countless others, are merely illustrations of the general principle that if there is something to be done there must be one head to do it. Europe learned that in emerging from the anarchy of feudalism, and it is embodied in her law. Our forefathers, however, were im pressed by their experience with an aversion for arbitrary power, and established in the Constitution the system of checks and bal ances. As long as the government could do only a mimimum of harm many were indif ferent as to whether it could do much that was good. To-day the feeling is quite differ ent. Increased governmental activity is de sired on all hands and though we may not have the concentration which is considered so essential in Europe, we must at least have co-operation. Grants to the legislature must not be too narrowly construed. Only in the clearest possible case should acts of the legis lature be declared unconstitutional, other wise we will have what Napoleon had, a three-chambered legislature impotent for good or ill alike. Happily the law as interpreted by the Supreme Court accords with the views here expressed. It were well if the state courts had also borne more strictly in mind
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the injunction of Chief Justice Marshall to remember that it is a constitution they are interpreting." CONSTITUTIONAL LAW (Police Power). In the May Columbia Law Review, Walter W. Cook asks, " What is the Police Power?" (V. vii, p. 322). He makes some exposition and criticisms of recent expressions of Mr. Burgess, Mr. Freund, and Mr. Hastings, " at tempts to formulate a definition, or perhaps better, a description of the police power by doing two things, viz: (1) by tracing briefly the history of the phrase, ' the police power ' in American law, and (2) by analyzing our constitutional system with reference to the distribution of governmental power between the national government and the states." . . . The definition of the police power which he offers is " that it is the unclassified, resid uary power of government vested by the Con stitution of the United States in the respective states." CONSTITUTIONAL LAW (Taxation of Movables). An interesting and important example of the way in which " old rules, which were accepted as unquestionable and were supposed to be simple in application and easy of execution, are in time found to work results which even the courts feel justified in essaying to remedy," is treated by John Bassett Moore, in the May Columbia Law Review (V. vii, p. 309), under the title, "/Tax ation of Movables and the Fourteenth Amend ment." "In levying taxes upon personal property two rules were supposed to be applicable. It must be within the jurisdiction of the taxing power, and this condition of subjection |was conceived to exist when the property had either an actual or a legal situs within jthe jurisdiction. The property had an actual situs when physically present; a legal situs when, although it was physically absent, the owner was domiciled within the jurisdiction. The latter rule was deduced from the theory that personal movables, in contemplation of law, follow the person of the owner, or, in the usual Latin formula, mobilia personam sequuntur. "That this theory was, without regard to the question of its logical justification or continuity, accepted as an established prin
