trusted to the general government for the good of the nation, it is not only the right, but the duty of Congress to see to it that the intercourse among the States and the transmission of intelligence are not obstructed or unnecessarily encumbered by State legislation. The electric telegraph marks an epoch in the progress of time. In a little more than a quarter of a century it has changed the habits of business, and become one of the necessities of commerce. It is indispensable as a means of inter-communication, but especially is it so in commercial transactions. The statistics of the business before the recent reduction in rates show that more than eighty per cent. of all the messages sent by telegraph related to commerce. Goods are sold and money paid upon telegraphic orders. Contracts are made by telegraphic correspondence, cargoes secured, and the movement of ships directed. The telegraphic announcement of the markets abroad regulate prices at home, and a prudent merchant rarely enters upon an important transaction without using the telegraph freely to secure information. The government of the United States, within the scope of its powers, operates upon every foot of territory under its jurisdiction. It legislates for the whole nation, and is not embarrassed by State lines. Its peculiar duty is to protect one part of the country from encroachments by another upon the national rights which belong to all. The State of Florida has attempted to confer upon a single corporation the exclusive right of transmitting intelligence by telegraph over a certain portion of its territory. This embraces the two westernmost counties of the State, and extends from Alabama to the Gulf. No telegraph line can cross the State from east to west, or from north to south, within these counties, except it passes over this territory. Within it is situated an important seaport, at which business centres, and with which those engaged in commercial pursuits have occasion more or less to communicate. The United States have there also the necessary machinery of the national government. They have a navy-yard, forts, custom-houses, courts, post-offices, and the appropriate officers for the enforcement of the laws. The legislation of Florida, if sustained, excludes all commercial intercourse by telegraph between the citizens of the other States and those residing upon this territory, except by the employment of this corporation. The United States cannot communicate with their own officers by telegraph except in the same way. The State, therefore, clearly has attempted to regulate commercial intercourse between its citizens and those of other States, and to control the transmission of all telegraphic correspondence within its own jurisdiction. It is unnecessary to decide how far this might have been done if Congress had not acted upon the same subject, for it has acted. The statute of July 24, 1866, in effect, amounts to a prohibition of all State monopolies in this particular. It substantially declares, in the interest of commerce and the convenient transmission of intelli gence from place to place by the government of the United States and its citizens, that the erection of telegraph lines shall, so far as State interference is concerned, be free to all who will submit to the conditions imposed by Congress, and that corporations organized under the laws of one State for constructing and operating telegraph lines shall not be excluded by another from prosecuting their business within its jurisdiction, if they accept the terms proposed by the national government for this national privilege. To this extent, certainly, the statute is a legitimate regulation of commercial intercourse among the States, and is appropriate legislation to carry into execution the powers of Congress over the postal service. * * * * The State law in question, so far as it confers exclusive rights upon the Pensacola Company, is certainly in conflict with this legislation of Congress. To that extent it is, therefore, inoperative as against a corporation of another State entitled to the privileges of the Act of Congress. Such being the case, the charter of the Pensalcola Company does not exclude the Western Union Company from the occupancy of the right of way of Pensacola and Louisville Railroad Company under the arrangement made for that purpose. Decree affirmed. UNITED STATES v. OHIO OIL COMPANY, ET AL. "THE PIPE LINE CASES." By the Act of Congress of June 29th, 1906, the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 was amended so that the first section reads in part as follows: "That the provisions of this act shall apply to any corporation or any person or persons engaged in the transportation of oil or other commodity, except water and except natural or artificial gas, by means of pipe lines, or partly by pipe lines and partly by railroad, or partly by pipe lines and partly by water, who shall be considered and held to be common carriers within the meaning and purpose of this act." Thereafter the Interstate Commerce Commission issued an order requiring the Ohio Oil Company, the Standard Oil Company and several other oil companies, being parties in control of pipe lines, to file with the Commission schedules of their rates and charges for the transportation of oil. The oil companies thereupon brought suit in the commerce court to set aside and annul the order, and a preliminary injunction was issued by that court, on the broad ground that the statute applies to every pipe line that crosses a State boundary, and that thus construed it is unconstitutional. The United States and the Interstate Commerce Commission appealed. The circumstances under which the amendment was passed are as follows: The Standard Oil Company, a New Jersey corporation, owned the stock of the New York Transit Company, a pipe line made a common carrier by the laws of New York, and of the National Transit Company, a Pennsylvania corporation of like character, and by these it connected the Appalachian oil field with its refineries in the East. It owned nearly all the stock of the Ohio Oil Company, which connected the Lima-Indiana field with its system; and the National Transit Company, controlled by it, owned nearly all the stock of the Prairie Oil and Gas Company, which ran from the midcontinent field in Oklahoma and Kansas and the Caddo field in Louisiana to Indiana, and connected with the previously mentioned lines. It also was largely interested in the Tide Water Pipe Company, Limited, which connected with the Appalachian and other fields and pursued the methods of the Standard Oil Company about to be described. By the before-mentioned and subordinate lines the Standard Oil Company had made itself master of the only practicable oil transportation between the oil fields east of California and the Atlantic Ocean, and carried much the greater part of the oil between those points. Availing itself of its monopoly of the means of transportation, the Standard Oil Company refused, through its subordinates, to carry any oil unless the same was sold to it or to them, and through them to it, on terms more or less dictated by itself. In this way it made itself master of the fields without the necessity of owning them, and carried across half the continent a great subject of international commerce coming from many owners, but by the duress of which the Standard Oil Company was master, carrying it all as its The main question is whether the act does and constitutionally can apply to the several constituents that then had been united into a single line. own. The government also brought separate suits against the Standard Oil Company, the Standard Oil Company of Louisiana, the Prairie Oil and Gas Company, and the Uncle Sam Oil Company. The principal questions involved being the same in all the cases, the one opinion of the court decided the suits instituted. MR. JUSTICE HOLMES delivered the opinion of the court: Taking up first the construction of the statute, we think it plain that it was intended to reach the combination of pipe lines that we have described. The provisions of the act are to apply to any person engaged in the transportation of oil by means of pipe lines. The words "who shall be considered and held to be common carriers within the meaning and purpose of this act" obviously are not intended to cut down the generality of the previous declaration to the meaning that only those shall be held common carriers within the act who were common carriers in a technical sense, but an injunction that those in control of pipe lines and engaged in the transportation of oil shall be dealt with as such. If the Standard Oil Company and its co-operating companies were not so engaged, no one was. It not only would be a sacrifice of fact to form, but would empty the act if the carriage to the seaboard of nearly all the oil east of California were held not to be transportation within its meaning, because by the exercise of their power the carriers imposed as a condition to the carriage a sale to themselves. As applied to them, while the amendment does not compel them to continue in operation, it does require them not to continue except as common carriers. That is the plain meaning, as has been held with regard to other statutes similarly framed. Atlantic Coast Line R. Co. v. Riverside Mills, 219 U. S. 186. Its evident purpose was to bring within its scope pipe lines that, although not technically common carriers, yet were carrying all oil offered, if only the offerers would sell at their price. The only matter requiring much consideration is the constitutionality of the act. That the transportation is commerce among the States we think clear. That conception cannot be made wholly dependent upon technical questions of title, and the fact that the oils transported belonged to the owner of the pipe line is not conclusive against the transportation being such commerce. Rearick v. Pennsylvania, 203 U. S. 507. See Texas & N. O. R. Co. v. Sabine Tram Co., 227 U. S. 111. The situation that we have described would make it illusory to deny the title of commerce to such transportation, beginning in purchase and ending in sale, for the same reasons that make it transportation within the act. The control of Congress over commerce among the States cannot be made a means of exercising powers not intrusted to it by the Constitution, but it may require those who are common carriers in substance to become so in form. So far as the statute contemplates future pipe lines and prescribes the conditions upon which they may be established, there can be no doubt that it is valid. So the objection is narrowed to the fact that it applies to lines already engaged in transportation. But, as we already have intimated, those lines that we are considering are common carriers now in everything but form. They carry everybody's oil to a market, although they compel outsiders to sell it before taking it into their pipes. The answer to their objection is not that they may give up the business, but that, as applied to them, the statute practically means no more than they must give up requiring a sale to themselves before carrying the oil that they now receive. The whole case is that the appellees, if they carry, must do it in a way that they do not like. There is no taking, and it does not become necessary to consider how far Congress could subject them to pecuniary loss without compensation in order to accomplish the end in view. Hoke v. United States, 227 U. S. 308; Lottery Case (Champion v. Ames), 188 U. S. 321. These considerations seem to us sufficient to dispose of the cases of the Standard Oil Company, the Ohio Oil Company, the Prairie Oil and Gas Company, and the Tide Water Pipe Company, Limited. The Standard Oil Company of Louisiana was incorported since the passage of the amendment, and before the beginning of this suit, to break up the monopoly of the New Jersey Standard Oil Company. It buys a large part of its oil from the Prairie Oil and Gas Company, which buys it at the wells in the mid-continent field and transfers the title to the Louisiana Company in that State. Its case also is covered by what we have said. There remains to be considered only the Uncle Sam Oil Company. This company has a refinery in Kansas and oil wells in Oklahoma, with a pipe line connecting the two which it has used for the sole purpose of conducting oil from its own wells to its own refinery. It would be a perversion of language, considering the sense in which it is used in the statute, to say that a man was engaged in the transportation of water whenever he pumped a pail of water from his well to his house. So as to oil. When, as in this case, a company is simply drawing oil from its own wells across a State line to its own refinery, for its own use, and that is all, we do not regard it as falling within the description of the act, the transportation being merely an incident to use at the end. In that case the decree will be affirmed. In the others the decree will be reversed. Decree reversed. PENNSYLVANIA v. THE WHEELING AND BELMONT BRIDGE COMPANY. 18 HOWARD, 421. 1855. The State of Virginia empowered the Wheeling and Belmont Bridge Company to build a bridge across the Ohio River at Wheeling. The bridge interfered with the passage of boats on the river. The State of Pennsylvania filed a bill to have the bridge removed as a public nuisance. In May, 1852, the Supreme Court of the United States decreed that it should be removed. Pending the decree the bridge was destroyed by a storm. The bridge was being rebuilt as it was originally despite the court's decree. On August 31, 1852, subsequent to the decree, Congress passed an act authorizing the Bridge Company to have and maintain the bridge at the height to which it had been rebuilt, and declared it to be a post-road of the United States. Pennsylvania moved for a writ of assistance to execute the original decree. The argument for Pennsylvania was that this Act of Congress was unconstitutional as interfering with navigation. This case was one of original jurisdiction in the Supreme Court. MR. JUSTICE NELSON delivered the opinion of the court. The defendants rely upon this Act of Congress as furnishing authority for the continuance of the bridge as constructed, and as superseding the effect and operation of the decree of the court previously rendered, declaring it an obstruction to the navigation. On the part of the plaintiff, it is insisted that the act is unconstitutional and void, which raises the principal question in the case. In order to a proper understanding of this question it is material to recur to the ground and principles upon which the majority of the court proceeded in rendering the decree now sought to be enforced. The bridge had been constructed under an act of the legislature of the State of Virginia; and it was admitted that act conferred full authority upon the defendants for the erection, subject only to the power of Congress in the regulation of commerce. It was claimed, however, that Congress had acted upon the subject and had regu |