In Public Clearing House v. Coyne12 was sustained the constitutionality of a congressional delegation of authority to the Postmaster-General to determine, without the aid of the courts, whether the mail of a given concern should be excluded from the mails because fraudulent or partaking of the nature of a lottery.

In this case the constitutionality of the laws providing for "fraud orders" was denied upon the grounds: First, that they provide no judicial hearing upon the question of illegality; second, that they authorize the seizure of letters without discriminating between those which may contain, and those which may not contain, prohibited matter; and third, that they empower the Postmaster-General to confiscate the money of the addressee which has become his property by the depositing of the letter in the mails.

10 110 U. S. 97; 3 Sup. Ct Rep. 548; 28 L. ed. 83.

11 192 U. S. 470; 24 Sup. Ct Rep. 349; 48 L. ed. 525.

12 194 U. S. 497; 24 Sup. Ct. Rep. 789; 48 L. ed. 1092.

As to the first of these objections the court say: " It is too late to argue that the process of law is denied whenever the disposition of property is affected by the order of an executive department. Many, if not most, of the matters presented to these departments require for their proper solution the judgment or discretion of the head of the department, and in many cases, notably those connected with the disposition of the public lands, the action of the department is accepted as final by the courts, and even when involving questions of law this action is attended by a strong presumption of its correctness." 13 As to the second point that the law authorizes the detention of all letters of the firm, many of which may be purely personal and having no connection with the prohibited enterprise, the court say: "In view of the fact that by these sections the postmaster is denied permission to open any letters not addressed to himself, there would seem to be no possible method of enforcing the law except by authorizing him to seize and detain all such letters. ... A ruling that only such letters as were obviously connected with the enterprise could be detained would amount to practically the annulment of the law." As to the third objection that the Postmaster-General is authorized by statute to confiscate the money or the representative of money, of the addressee, the court say that this is based on the hypothesis, that the money or other article contained in a registered letter becomes the property of the addressee as soon as the letter is deposited in the post-office. As to this the opinion says: " The action of the Postmaster-General in seizing the letter does not operate as a confiscation of the money, or the determination of the title thereto; but merely as a refusal to extend the facilities of the Post-Office Department to the final delivery of the letter. Congress might undoubtedly have authorized the postmaster at the depositing office to decline to receive the letter at all if its forbidden character were known to him, but as this would be impossible, we think the power to refuse the facilities of the department to the transmission of such letter attends it at every step, from its first deposit in the mail to its final delivery to the addressee; and as the character of the letter cannot be ascertained until it arrives at the office of delivery, the government may then act and refuse to consummate the transaction. If the letter and its contents become the property of the addressee when deposited in the mail, the subsequent seizure by the government would not impair his title or prevent an action by him for the amount of remittance. True, this might be of no practical value to him, but it is a sufficient reply to show that the title to the letter did not change by its seizure by the postmaster."

13 Citing Bates & G. Co. v. Payne, 194 U. S. 106; 24 Sup. Ct. Rep. 595; 48 L. ed. 894.

Though the judgment of the Postmaster-General, as granted him by statute, has thus been held to be final and conclusive with reference to the issuance of fraud orders, the Supreme Court held in American School of Magnetic Healing v. McAnnulty14 that the law required that this judgment should be one founded on facts ascertained by evidence, and that it might not be simply the Postmaster-General's personal judgment as to the fraudulent character of the business whose mail is to be excluded. Thus, in this case, the Postmaster-General having issued a fraud order against a corporation which assumed to heal disease through the influence of the mind, and to give advice and treatment by letter, the court declared the order not properly issued. The court say as to the claims of the plaintiffs:

" There is no exact standard of absolute truth by which to prove the assertion false and a fraud. We mean by that to say that the claim of the complainants cannot be the subject of proof as of an ordinary fact. . . . We may not believe in the efficacy of the treatment to the extent claimed by the complainants, and we may have no sympathy with them in such claims, and yet their effectiveness is but a matter of opinion in any court, . . . That the complainants had a hearing before the Postmaster-General, and that his decision was made after such hearing, cannot affect the case."

14 187 U. S. 94; 23 Sup. Ct. Rep. 33; 47 L. ed. 90.