drawing from the
interstate business."[646] A year later, nevertheless, Justice Brandeis,
speaking for the Court in Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Co. _v._ Tax
Commission,[647] asserted flatly: "No decision of this Court lends
support to the proposition that an occupation tax upon local business,
otherwise valid, must be held void merely because the local and
interstate branches are for some reason inseparable."[648] An occupation
tax, like other taxes and expenses, lessens the benefit derived by
interstate commerce from the joint operation with it of the intrastate
business of the carrier; but it is not an undue burden on interstate
commerce where, as in this case, the advantage to the carrier, and to
the interstate commerce, of continuing the intrastate business is
greatly in excess of the tax. And subsequent holdings in cases involving
foreign corporations doing a mixed business, comprising both interstate
and intrastate elements, have tended on the whole to restore the rule
stated in Paul _v._ Virginia[649] shortly after the Civil War, that the
Constitution does not confer upon a foreign corporation the right to
engage in local business in a State without its assent, which it may
give on such terms as it chooses.[650]

State Taxation of Property Engaged in, and of the Proceeds From,
Interstate Commerce

GENERAL ISSUE

In this area of Constitutional Law the principle asserted in the State
Freight Tax Case,[651] that a State may not tax interstate commerce, is
confronted with the principle that a State may tax all purely domestic
business within its borders and all property "within its jurisdiction."
Inasmuch as most large concerns prosecute both an interstate and a
domestic business, while the instrumentalities of interstate commerce
and the pecuniary returns from such commerce are ordinarily property
within the jurisdiction of some State or other, the task before the
Court in drawing the line between the immunity claimed by interstate
business on the one hand and the prerogatives claimed by local power on
the other has at times involved it in self-contradiction, as successive
developments have brought into prominence novel aspects of its complex
problem or have altered the perspective in which the interests competing
for its protection have appeared. In this field words of the late
Justice Rutledge, spoken in 1946, are especially applicable: "For
cleanly as the commerce clause has worked affirmatively on the