w forbidding
smoking by minors. It is a crime if he light it. Sufficient has,
perhaps, been said to show the extraordinary scope and elasticity of
this, the widest, vaguest, and most dangerous domain of our modern
legislation, though perhaps we should add one or two striking
cases affecting personal liberty, as, for instance, a citizen of
Pennsylvania marries his first cousin in Delaware and returns to
Pennsylvania, where the marriage is void and he becomes guilty of a
criminal offence; a white man in Massachusetts who marries a negress
or mulatto may be guilty of the crime of miscegenation in other
States; a woman might work fifty-eight hours a week in Rhode Island,
but if she work over fifty-six in Massachusetts may involve her
employer, as well as herself, in a penal offence.

[Footnote 1: Mugler _v_. Kansas, 123 U. S, 623.]

The most valuable of all police legislation is, of course, that to
protect public health and safety; and prominent in the legislation of
the last twenty years are the laws to secure pure and wholesome
food and drugs. Possibly "wholesome" is saying too much, for our
legislative intelligence has not yet arrived at an understanding of
the danger from cold storage or imperfectly canned food, though Canada
and other English colonies have already legislated on the subject, to
say nothing of our tariff war with Germany on the point. One may guess
that ninety-nine per cent. of the present food of the American people,
leaving out the farmers themselves, is of meat of animals which have
been dead many months, If not years, and from vegetables which date at
least many months back. It is nonsense to suppose that such food is
equally wholesome with fresh food, or that there is not considerable
risk of acute poisoning or a permanent impairment of the digestive
system. Senator Stewart, of Nevada, has shown that nearly fifty per
cent. of the soldiers of the Spanish War had permanent digestive
trouble, as against less than three per cent. in the Civil War, which
took place before cold-storage food was known, or canned food largely
in use. It was hopeless for the States to act until there was
Federal legislation on the subject, as the health authorities had no
constitutional power over goods imported from other States; but the
passage, under Roosevelt, of a national food and drugs act has given
a great impetus to the reform, and by this writing more than half the
States have passed pure-food laws, being usually