In the Jacobs case, Presiding Justice Noah Davis, speaking for the intermediate appellate court sitting in the city of New York, and undoubtedly acquainted with conditions then and there existing, used the following language: "A careful study of the act has satisfied us that its aim was not 'to improve the public health by prohibiting the manufacture of cigars and preparation of tobacco in any form in tenement houses in certain cases, and regulating the use of tenement houses in certain cases,' as declared in the title, but to suppress and restrain such manufacture in the cases covered by the act for the purpose of preventing successful competition injurious to other modes of manufacturing the same articles.... If the act were general and aimed at all tenement houses, and prohibited for sanitary reasons the manufacture of cigars and tobacco in all such buildings, or if it prohibited such manufacture in the living-rooms of all tenants, another case would be presented. But in the form in which it comes before us it is so unjust in its inequality, so harsh and oppressive upon the labor of poverty, so keenly discriminative in favor of the stronger classes engaged in the same occupation, that it certainly ought not to have been enacted; but, being enacted, ought to be held invalid because it deprives the appellant of his right and liberty to use his occupation in his own house for the support of himself and family, and takes away the value of his labor, which is his property protected by the Constitution equally as though it were in lands or money, without due process of law."[13] Discussing the Jacobs case, Mr. P. Tecumseh Sherman of the New York bar, who is reputed to be one of the best informed men in our state upon the subject of labor conditions and labor legislation and who was at one time a state commissioner of labor, said in a letter published a few weeks ago that the tenement-house statute, although purporting to be for the public health, was not a reasonable regulation for that purpose, because it arbitrarily selected one article and forbade its manufacture under certain conditions not generally unsanitary, and he added that "as matter of fact, the act was not designed to protect health but to put out of business one set of competitors in a trade war."