otteries, making it a crime against the United States to
carry or send lottery tickets or advertisements across state lines;[3]
an act to prevent the importation of prize-fight films.[4] These are
only a few among many similar statutes which might be mentioned. In all
of them the motive is clear. There is no concealment about it. Their
primary object is to suppress or regulate the trusts, lotteries,
patent-medicine frauds. The regulation of commerce is merely a matter of
words and legal form.

[Footnote 1: Art. I, Sec. 8.]

[Footnote 2: _Hipolite Egg Company v. United States_, 220 U.S., 45.]

[Footnote 3: _Champion v. Ames_, 188 U.S., 321.]

[Footnote 4: _Weber v. Freed_, 239 U.S., 325.]

Especially noteworthy is the rapidly expanding body of social
legislation--federal Employers' Liability Act, Hours of Service acts,
Child Labor Law, White Slave Act and the like, all drawn with an eye to
the commerce clause but designed to accomplish objects quite distinct
from the regulation of commerce.

As already said, the Commerce Clause has been found most available for
purposes of such legislation. Other clauses have, however, served their
turn. For example, the grant of power to lay taxes was utilized to
destroy an extensive industry obnoxious to the dairy interests--the
manufacture of oleomargarine artificially colored to look like
butter.[1] Also to invade the police power of the States in respect of
the regulation of the sale and use of narcotic drugs.[2] Also to check
speculation and extortion in the sale of theatre tickets![3] The power
to borrow money and create fiscal agencies was utilized to facilitate
the making of loans upon farm security at low rates of interest through
the incorporation of Federal land banks or Joint Stock land banks.[4]

[Footnote 1: _McCray v. United States_, 195 U.S., 27.]

[Footnote 2: Narcotic Drug Act. Held constitutional in _United States v.
Doremus_, 249 U.S., 86; _Webb v. United States_, 249 U.S., 96.]

[Footnote 3: Revenue Act of 1921, Title VIII, subdivisions 2 and 3.]

[Footnote 4: _Smith v. Kansas City Title Co._, 255 U.S., 180.]

It would be an insult to intelligence to claim that legislation such as
this, wearing the form of revenue measure or regulation of commerce but
in reality enacted with a different motive, does not involve an enormous
extension of the national power beyond what the makers of the
Constitution supposed they were conferring or intended to confer. What,