In Brown v. State of Maryland (1827) 25 U.S. 419, Brown was indicted before the city court at Baltimore for an alleged violation of a statute of the state of Maryland requiring payment of a license fee by all importers of foreign merchandise, who were required to take out a license before they were authorized to sell any of the imported merchandise, under penalty of a forfeiture of the amount of the license tax, together with a fine of one hundred dollars. The defendants having demurred to the indictment, judgment was rendered against them in the city court, which judgment was affirmed by the court of appeals, whereupon the cause was brought before the supreme court of the United States by writ of error. The Supreme Court invalidated a state licensing tax and held that a state could not tax imports as long as the property remained in its original form or package.The Court held that When goods are sent from one State to another for sale, or in consequence of a sale, they become part of its general property, and amenable to its laws; provided that no discrimination be made against them as goods from another State, and that they be not taxed by reason of being brought from another State, but only taxed in the usual way as other goods are. In the opinion, the cause of action is explained as follows (p. 442): "This indictment is against the importer, for selling a package of dry goods, in the form in which it was imported, without a license. This state of things is changed, if he sells them, or otherwise mixes them with the general property of the state, by breaking up his packages, and travelling with them as an itinerant peddler. In the first case, the tax intercepts the import, as an import, in its way to become incorporated with the general mass of property, and denies it the privilege of becoming so incorporated, until it shall have contributed to the revenue of the state. It denies to the importer the right of using the privilege which he has purchased from the United States, until he shall have also purchased it from the state. In the last cases, the tax finds the article already incorporated with the mass of property, by the act of the importer. He has used the privilege he had purchased, and has himself mixed them up with the common mass, and the law may treat them as it finds them." The following quotation from the opinion has become a classic (p. 441): "The constitutional prohibition on the states to lay a duty on imports, a prohibition which a vast majority of them must feel an interest in preserving, may certainly come in conflict with their acknowledged power to tax persons and property within their territory. The power, and the restriction on it, though quite distinguishable, when they do not approach each other, may yet, when the intervening colors between white and black, approach so nearly, as to perplex the understanding, as colors perplex the vision, in marking the distinction between them. Yet the distinction exists, and must be marked as the cases arise. Until they do arise, it might be premature to state any rule as being universal in its application. It is sufficient for the present to say, generally, that when the importer has so acted upon the thing imported, that it has become incorporated and mixed up with the mass of property in the country, it has, perhaps lost its distinctive character as an import, and has become subject to the taxing power of the state; but while remaining the property of the importer, in his warehouse, in the original form or package in which it was imported, a tax upon it is too plainly a duty on imports, to escape the prohibition in the constitution." The Court concluded (p. 449): "We think there is error in the judgment of the court of appeals of the state of Maryland, in affirming the judgment of the Baltimore city court, because the act of the legislature of Maryland, imposing the penalty for which the said judgment is rendered, is repugnant to the constitution of the United States, and, consequently, void. The judgment is to be reversed, and the cause remanded to that court, with instructions to enter judgment in favor of the appellants."