usetts, to do business or make
contracts without making full annual returns and submitting in all
respects to the State jurisdiction. Under recent decisions of the
Supreme Court, however, this power does not extend to any corporation
doing an interstate commerce business; and, of course, under the
Federal Incorporation Act, proposed by the present administration, the
States would be completely deprived of such power, except, possibly,
in so far as Congress may choose to relinquish it to them. How far,
independent of such permission by Congress, the ordinary police power
would extend, it will be almost impossible to define.

XI

LABOR LAWS

Much of the law affecting employers or combinations of capital has
its correlative, or rather equivalent, in combinations of labor; but
leaving the matter of combinations for the next chapter, and reserving
for this only statutes affecting the individual, we must again insist
upon that great cardinal liberty of labor under the English common
law, which already gives it a certain privilege and dispenses it from
the laws affecting ordinary contracts, that is to say: _the contract
of labor, alone of contracts under the English law, may not be
enforced_. When we say "enforced" we of course mean that the laborer
may not be compelled to carry it out; what, in the law, we call
specific performance. This is a matter of such essential importance
that it cannot be too strongly accentuated, as it is surprising how
ignorant still the popular mind is upon this subject, how little it
realizes labor's peculiar advantage in this particular. But it has
always been true of the English and American law, at least since that
early labor legislation sketched above in chapter 4 which came to
a final end at least as early as Elizabeth, that no man could be
compelled to work--except, of course, by way of punishment for
crime--and more than that, he could not even be compelled to work or
carry out a specific contract of labor to which he had bound himself
by all possible formality. "Specific performance" is the peculiar
process of a court of chancery, and at this point the resistance of
the freemen of England we have traced in earlier chapters became
absolutely effectual; that is to say, the court of chancery was never
allowed to extend its strong arm over the labor contract. Even that
famous first precedent of "government by injunction" discussed by us
above (page 74) was resisted in early times,