Referring to the private companies, "Are the people of the city already supplied with natural gas for public and private use?" the circular asked. "They are," it answered, and goes on: "Why does the city want to go into the natural-gas business, then?" "To boom the lands of real-estate speculators." This is a charge affecting the Legislature and Executive and State courts of Ohio, the courts of the United States, the people of Toledo, and all the members of their city government. Burke confessed that he did not know how to draw up an indictment against a whole people. That art has been acquired since his day. "Are these bonds of unquestionable validity?" this catechism of libel upon a community queries. "By no means. Prominent taxpayers have suits pending attacking the constitutionality of the act under which they are issued." "Have these cases," the last question ran, "ever been tried on their merits?" "They have not." They had been tried so far that the United States and State courts had refused on every ground urged to interfere with their issue and sale, declaring the legislation authorizing them to be valid. They had never been tried any further in the United States courts for a very good--or bad--reason. The "prominent taxpayers," after their defeat before Judge Jackson, took every possible means to prevent the case from reaching a final adjudication. The invariable rule of the United States Supreme Court has been to treat as final and conclusive the decisions of State courts as to such domestic issues. During the hundred years of its existence not a case can be found in which that court has overruled the fixed and received construction given to a State law by the courts of that State.[530] The only hope for the suit of the "prominent taxpayers" was, therefore, that the Supreme Court of the United States would for their special profit reverse the practice to which it had consistently adhered since the establishment of the government. What they really thought of their prospect of success in that effort they confessed when their case, no longer delayable, was upon the point of being reached.