rt held and asserted that it had never consciously held
otherwise, that a statute of a State intended to regulate or to tax,
or to impose any other restriction upon the transmission of persons or
property or telegraphic messages, from one State to another, is not
within the class of legislation which the States may enact in the
absence of legislation by Congress; and that such statutes are void
even as to the part of such transmission which may be within the
State." Chief Justice Waite, and Justice Bradley and Justice Gray,
however, dissented for various reasons.

In the _Louisville Railway Company_ v. _Mississippi_,[31] however, in
1899, the court, evidently yielding to southern public opinion,
reversed itself by the decision that an interstate carrier could not
run a train through Mississippi without attaching thereto a separate
car for Negroes and had the audacity to argue that this is not an
interference with interstate commerce.[32] To show how inconsistent
this interpretation was one should bear in mind that in _Hall_ v.
_DeCuir_ the court had held that this was exactly what a State could
not do in that the statute acted not upon business through local
instruments to be employed after coming into the State, but directly
upon business as it comes into the State from without or goes out from
within, although it purported only to control the carrier when engaged
within the State. It necessarily influenced the conduct of the carrier
to some extent in the management of his business throughout his
entire voyage. "No carrier of passengers," said the court in _Hall_ v.
_DeCuir_, "can conduct his business with satisfaction to himself, or
comfort to those employing him, if on one side of a State line his
passengers, both white and colored, must be permitted to occupy the
same cabin, and on the other to be kept separate. Uniformity in the
regulation by which he is to be governed from one end to the other of
his route is a necessity in his business, and to secure it, Congress,
which is untrammelled by State lines, has been invested with exclusive
legislative power of determining what such regulation should be."

Giving the opinion in the Mississippi case, however, Justice Brewer
said: "It has been often held by this court that there is a commerce
wholly within the State which is not subject to the constitutional
provision and the distinctions between commerce among the States and
the other class of commerce between citizens