Fuel was added to the discontent in the spring of 1895, when the Supreme Court declared null and void the income tax law of the previous year.[38] The opponents of the tax, having lost in the Congress, made their last stand in the highest Federal tribunal, and marshaled on their side an array of legal talent seldom seen in an action at law, including Senator Edmunds, Mr. Joseph H. Choate, and other attorneys prominently identified with railway and corporation litigation. No effort was spared in bringing pressure to bear on the Court, and no arguments, legal, political, and social, were neglected in the attempt to impress upon the Court the importance of stopping Populism by a judicial pronunciamento. Conservative New York papers, like the _Herald_, boldly prophesied in the summer of 1894 that "the income tax will be blotted from the statute books before the people are cursed with its inquisitorial enforcement." No easy victory lay before the opponents of the income tax, for the law seemed to be against them. In 1870, the Supreme Court had upheld the Civil War income tax without a dissenting voice, and had distinctly said: "Our conclusions are that direct taxes, within the meaning of the Constitution, are only capitation taxes as expressed in that instrument and taxes on real estate, and that the tax of which the plaintiff in error complains [the income tax] is within the category of an excise or duty." Of course, the terms of the new law were not identical with those of the Civil War measure, and the Supreme Court had been known to reverse itself. The attorneys against the tax left no stone unturned. As Professor Seligman remarks, "Some of the important financial interests now engaged a notable array of eminent counsel to essay the arduous task of persuading the Supreme Court that it might declare the income tax a direct tax without reversing its previous decisions. The effort was made with the most astonishing degree of ability and ingenuity, and the briefs and arguments of the opposing counsel fill several large volumes.... The counsel's arguments abound in historical errors and economic inaccuracies.... Errors and misstatements which might be multiplied pale into insignificance compared with the misinterpretation put upon the origin and purpose of the direct-tax clause--a misinterpretation which like most of the preceding mistakes was bodily adopted by the majority of the Court, who evidently found no time for an independent investigation of the subject." Having exhausted their ingenuity in the matter of technicalities and imposing historical and economic and legal arguments, the counsel appealed to every class fear and prejudice that might be entertained by the Court.