pare Busch Jewelry Co. v. United Retail Employees' Union, 281 N. Y. 150; 22 N. E. 2d 320, and Baillis v. Fuchs, 283 N. Y. 133; 27 N. E. 2d 812.

To maintain the balance of our federal system, insofar as it is committed to our care, demands at once zealous regard for the guarantees of the Bill of Rights and due recognition of the powers belonging to the states. Such an adjustment requires austere judgment, and a precise summary of the result may help to avoid misconstruction.

(1) We do not qualify the Thornhill and Carlson decisions. We reaffirm them. They involved statutes baldly forbidding all picketing near an employer's place of business. Entanglement with violence was expressly out of those cases. The statutes had to be dealt with on their face, and therefore we struck them down. Such an unlimited ban on free communication declared as the law of a state by a state court enjoys no greater protection here. Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U. S. 296; American Federation of Labor v. Swing, post, p. 321. But just as a state through its legislature may deal with specific circumstances menacing the peace by an appropriately drawn act, Thornhill v. Alabama, supra, so the law of a state may be fitted to a concrete situation through the authority given by the state to its courts. This is precisely the kind of situation which the Thornhill opinion excluded from its scope. "We are not now concerned with picketing en masse or otherwise conducted which might occasion such imminent and aggravated danger ... as to justify a statute narrowly drawn to cover the precise situation giving rise to the danger." 310 U. S. 105.2 We would not strike down a statute which author

2 See also this statement in the Carlson opinion: "The power and duty of the State to take adequate steps to preserve the peace and protect the privacy, the lives, and the property of its residents cannot be doubted." 310 U. S. 113.

ized the courts of Illinois to prohibit picketing when they should find that violence had given to the picketing a coercive effect whereby it would operate destructively as force and intimidation. Such a situation is presented by this record. It distorts the meaning of things to generalize the terms of an injunction derived from and directed towards violent misconduct as though it were an abstract prohibition of all picketing wholly unrelated to the violence involved.

(2) The exercise of the state's power which we are sustaining is the very antithesis of a ban on all discussion in Chicago of a matter of public importance. Of course we would not sustain such a ban. The injunction is confined to conduct near stores dealing in respondent's milk, and it deals with this narrow area precisely because the coercive conduct affected it. An injunction so adjusted to a particular situation is in accord with the settled practice of equity, sanctioned by such guardians of civil liberty as Mr. Justice Cardozo. Compare Nann v. Raimist, 255 N. Y. 307; 174 N. E. 690. Such an injunction must be read in the context of its circumstances. Nor ought state action be held unconstitutional by interpreting the law of the state as though, to use a phrase of Mr. Justice Holmes, one were fired with a zeal to pervert. If an appropriate injunction were put to abnormal uses in its enforcement, so that encroachments were made on free discussion outside the limits of violence, as for instance discussion through newspapers or on the radio, the doors of this Court are always open.

(3) The injunction which we sustain is "permanent" only for the temporary period for which it may last. It is justified only by the violence that induced it and only so long as it counteracts a continuing intimidation. Familiar equity procedure assures opportunity for modifying or vacating an injunction when its continuance is no longer warranted. Here again, the state courts have not

the last say. They must act in subordination to the duty of this Court to enforce constitutional liberties even when denied through spurious findings of fact in a state court. Compare Chambers v. Florida, 309 U. S. 227. Since the union did not urge that the coercive effect had disappeared either before us or, apparently, before the state court, that question is not now here.

(4) A final word. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press cannot be too often invoked as basic to our scheme of society. But these liberties will not be advanced or even maintained by denying to the states with all their resources, including the instrumentality of their courts, the power to deal with coercion due to extensive violence. If the people of Illinois desire to withdraw the use of the injunction in labor controversies, the democratic process for legislative reform is at their disposal. On the other hand, if they choose to leave their courts with the power which they have historically exercised, within the circumscribed limits which this opinion defines, and we deny them that instrument of government, that power has been taken from them permanently. Just because these industrial conflicts raise anxious difficulties, it is most important for us not to intrude into the realm of policy-making by reading our own notions into the Constitution.

MR. JUSTICE BLACK, dissenting.

Affirmed.

In my belief the opinion just announced gives approval to an injunction which seriously infringes upon the constitutional rights of freedom of speech and the press. To such a result I cannot agree.

Before detailing the reasons for my disagreement, some preliminary observations will doubtless aid in clarifying the subsidiary issues. The right of the Illinois courts to enjoin violence is not denied in this case. And I agree

that nothing in the Federal Constitution deprives them of that right. But it is claimed that Illinois-through its courts has here sanctioned an injunction so sweeping in its terms as to deny to petitioners and others their constitutional rights freely to express their views on matters of public concern. And this is the single federal question we must decide. In their brief, petitioners state that they “have never and do not at the present time in any way condone or justify any violence by any member of the defendant union. Petitioners did not object to the issuance of an injunction restraining acts of violence. There is no contention made that the act of the Chancellor in granting such an injunction was erroneous.' "Ethically, morally and legally," the petitioning union disclaims and condemns the acts of violence. And the master who conducted the hearings in the case specifically found that the union officials had instructed their pickets to refrain from violence. The record shows that

'The record shows that in a petition to determine damages, filed even before the trial court entered its final order, the petitioners said: "The court was informed at that time [when the original effort was made to secure dissolution of the temporary injunction] that the defendants and each of them, were wholly in accord with the injunction prohibiting violence of any kind. . . ." R. 265.

2

"That the instructions given to such persons so patrolling or picketing by the officers of the defendant Union have been to do same peacefully and not to interfere with the ordinary course of business in said stores, except to patrol back and forth with said placards." R. 230-231.

Meadowmoor had originally sought an injunction in the federal district court. The federal master's report, introduced in this case as an exhibit for Meadowmoor, states: "I further find that the instructions given to such persons patrolling or peacefully picketing by the officers of the defendant association have been not to speak or carry on any conversation with any other person or persons in front of the said premises, nor to interfere with the orderly course of business of the said stores, except to patrol back and forth with the said placard." R. 165,

the officials gave these instructions (which were obeyed), not only because they realized that resort to force and violence would be reprehensible and indefensible, but also because they recognized that such lawless conduct injures a labor union far more than it helps it. Aside from this, it cannot be doubted that attempts to persuade others by the application of physical force and violence as a substitute for persuasion by reason and peaceable argument is contrary to the first principles of our government. Nor can it be questioned that it is a prime function of courts to provide law enforcement means intended both to punish such illegal conduct and to protect against it. But this great responsibility is entrusted to courts not merely to determine the guilt or innocence of defendants, but to do so in such manner that those brought before them may enjoy a trial in which all their constitutional rights are safeguardedincluding the constitutional guaranties of freedom of speech and the press.

In determining whether the injunction does deprive petitioners of their constitutional liberties, we cannot and should not lose sight of the nature and importance of the particular liberties that are at stake. And in reaching my conclusion I view the guaranties of the First Amendment as the foundation upon which our governmental structure rests and without which it could not continue to endure as conceived and planned.

3

Free

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." It is now too well settled to require citation that by the Fourteenth Amendment the guaranties of the First Amendment are protected against abridgment by the states.

4

Thomas Jefferson, the great strategist of the campaign to bring about the adoption of the Bill of Rights, a campaign which he began even before the Constitution was adopted, said as to one of