A year later a Mississippi "privilege tax" laid upon each person soliciting business for a laundry not licensed in the State, was set aside directly on the authority of the Robbins case.[612] It would appear that Robbins and his numerous progeny can once more claim full constitutional status.[613]
Whether the carriage of persons from one State to another was a branch of interstate commerce was a question which the Court was able to side-step in Gibbons _v._ Ogden.[614] A quarter of a century later, however, an affirmative answer was suggested in the Passenger Cases,[615] in which a State tax on each passenger arriving on a vessel from a foreign country was set aside, though chiefly in reliance on existing treaties and acts of Congress. But similar cases arising after the Civil War were disposed of by direct recourse to the commerce clause.[616] Meantime, in 1865, the newly admitted State of Nevada, in an endeavor to prevent a threatened dissipation of its population, levied a special tax on railroad and stage companies for every passenger they carried out of the State, and in Crandall _v._ Nevada[617] this act was held void on the general ground that the National Government had at all times the right to require the services of its citizens at the seat of government and they the correlative right to visit the seat of government, rights which, if the Nevada tax was valid, were at the mercy of any State, the power to tax being without limit. Reference was also made to the right of the government to transport troops at all times by the most expeditious method. Two of the Justices, however, rejected this line of reasoning and held the act to be void under the commerce clause.[618] But it was not until 1885 that the Court, in deciding Gloucester Ferry Company _v._ Pennsylvania,[619] stated flatly that "Commerce among the States * * * includes the transportation of persons,"[620] and hence was not taxable by the States, a proposition which is still good law.[621] Four years earlier it had been held that the transmission of telegraph messages from one State to another, being interstate commerce, was something that the State of origin could not tax.[622]
State Taxation of the Interstate Commerce Privilege: Foreign Corporations