highest percentage of gross receipts, and so substantially in South Carolina.  In Washington, an elaborate statute against discrimination by public-service corporations was passed by the initiative; but as the statute itself omitted the enacting clause the law has been held to be of no effect.  Lastly, we will note as the most recent tendency, a more intelligent limitation by the States themselves of corporations organized in and by other States, frequently denying to such the right of eminent domain or, as in Massachusetts, to do business or make contracts without making full annual returns and submitting in all respects to the State jurisdiction.  Under recent decisions of the Supreme Court, however, this power does not extend to any corporation doing an interstate commerce business; and, of course, under the Federal Incorporation Act, proposed by the present administration, the States would be completely deprived of such power, except, possibly, in so far as Congress may choose to relinquish it to them.  How far, independent of such permission by Congress, the ordinary police power would extend, it will be almost impossible to define.

XI

LABOR LAWS

Much of the law affecting employers or combinations of capital has its correlative, or rather equivalent, in combinations of labor; but leaving the matter of combinations for the next chapter, and reserving for this only statutes affecting the individual, we must again insist upon that great cardinal liberty of labor under the English common law, which already gives it a certain privilege and dispenses it from the laws affecting ordinary contracts, that is to say:  the contract of labor, alone of contracts under the English law, may not be enforced.  When we say “enforced” we of course mean that the laborer may not be compelled to carry it out; what, in the law, we call specific performance.  This is a matter of such essential importance that it cannot be too strongly accentuated, as it is surprising how ignorant still the popular mind is upon this subject, how little it realizes labor’s peculiar advantage in this particular.  But it has always been true of the English and American law, at least since that early labor legislation sketched above in chapter 4 which came to a final end at least as early as Elizabeth, that no man could be compelled to work—­except, of course, by way of punishment for crime—­and more than that, he could not even be compelled to work or carry out a specific contract of labor to which he had bound himself by all possible formality.  “Specific performance” is the peculiar process of a court of chancery, and at this point the resistance of the freemen of England we have traced in earlier chapters became absolutely effectual; that is to say, the court of chancery was never allowed to extend its strong arm over the labor contract.  Even that famous first precedent of “government by injunction” discussed by us above (page 74)