decision to mark a retreat from the Berwind-White
case.[608]

The second case, Nippert _v._ Richmond,[609] involved a municipal
ordinance imposing upon solicitors of orders for goods a license tax of
fifty dollars and one-half of one per cent of the gross earnings,
commissions, etc., for the preceding year in excess of $1,000. Speaking
for the same majority that had decided McLeod _v._ Dilworth Co., Justice
Rutledge found that "as the case has been made, the issue is
substantially whether the long line of so-called 'drummer cases'
beginning with Robbins _v._ Shelby County Taxing District, 120 U.S. 489,
shall be adhered to in result or shall now be overruled in the light of
what attorneys for the city say are recent trends requiring that
outcome."[610] The tax was held void, Berwind-White being not only
"distinguished" this time, but also "explained." "The drummer," said
Justice Rutledge, "is a figure representative of a by-gone day," citing
Wright, Hawkers and Walkers in Early America (1927). "But his modern
prototype persists under more euphonious appellations. So endure the
basic reasons which brought about his protection from the kind of local
favoritism the facts of this case typify."[611]

A year later a Mississippi "privilege tax" laid upon each person
soliciting business for a laundry not licensed in the State, was set
aside directly on the authority of the Robbins case.[612] It would
appear that Robbins and his numerous progeny can once more claim full
constitutional status.[613]

TAXATION OF CARRIAGE OF PERSONS

Whether the carriage of persons from one State to another was a branch
of interstate commerce was a question which the Court was able to
side-step in Gibbons _v._ Ogden.[614] A quarter of a century later,
however, an affirmative answer was suggested in the Passenger
Cases,[615] in which a State tax on each passenger arriving on a vessel
from a foreign country was set aside, though chiefly in reliance on
existing treaties and acts of Congress. But similar cases arising after
the Civil War were disposed of by direct recourse to the commerce
clause.[616] Meantime, in 1865, the newly admitted State of Nevada, in
an endeavor to prevent a threatened dissipation of its population,
levied a special tax on railroad and stage companies for every passenger
they carried out of the State, and in Crandall _v._ Nevada[617] this act
was held void on the general ground that the National Government had at
all time