Those who undertake to criticize the Supreme Court for this assumption of power do not always distinguish between the power itself and the manner of its exercise. What would have happened if the state legislatures had been given a free hand to regulate, penalize, and blackmail corporations at will during the evolution of our national economic system may be left to the imagination of those who recall from their history the breezy days of "wild-cat" currency, repudiation, and broken faith which characterized the thirty years preceding the Civil War when the Federal judiciary was under the dominance of the states' rights school. The regulation of a national economic system by forty or more local legislatures would be nothing short of an attempt to combine economic unity with local anarchy. It is possible to hold that the Court has been too tender of corporate rights in assuming the power of judicial review, and at the same time recognize the fact that such a power, vested somewhere in the national government, is essential to the continuance of industries and commerce on a national scale. * * * * * Thus far attention has been directed to the activities of the Federal Supreme Court in establishing the principle of judicial review particularly in connection with legislation relative to railway corporations, but it should be noted that judicial review covers all kinds of social legislation relative to hours and conditions of labor as well as the charges of common carriers. In 1905, for example, the Supreme Court in the celebrated case of Lochner _v._ New York declared null and void a New York law fixing the hours of work in bakeshops at ten per day, basing its action on the principle that the right to contract in relation to the hours of labor was a part of the liberty which the individual enjoyed under the Fourteenth Amendment. Mr. Justice Holmes, who dissented in the case, declared that it was decided on an economic theory which a large part of the country did not entertain, and protested that the Fourteenth Amendment did not "enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's _Social Statics_." As a matter of fact, however, the Supreme Court of the United States has declared very little social legislation invalid, and has been inclined to take a more liberal view of such matters than the supreme courts of the states. The latter also have authority to declare state laws void as violating the Federal Constitution, and when a state court of proper jurisdiction invalidates a state law, there is, under the Federal judiciary act, no appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States. Consequently, the Fourteenth Amendment means in each state what the highest court holds it to mean, and since the adoption of that Amendment at least one thousand state laws have been nullified by the action of state courts, under the color of that Amendment or their respective state constitutions.