Justice Day, for the majority, said that Congress does not have the power to regulate commerce of goods that are manufactured by children and that the Keating-Owen Act of 1916 was therefore unconstitutional. Drawing a distinction between the manufacture of goods and the regulation of certain goods themselves "inherently evil", the Court maintained that the issue did not concern the power to keep certain immoral products out of the stream of interstate commerce, distinguishing previous cases upholding Congress's power to control lottery schemes, prostitution, and liquor. The Court reasoned that in those cases, the goods themselves were inherently immoral and thus open to congressional scrutiny. In this case, however, the issue at hand was the manufacture of cotton, a good whose use is not immoral. The Court further held that the manufacture of cotton did not in itself constitute interstate commerce. The Court recognized that disparate labor regulations placed the various states on unequal ground in terms of economic competitiveness, but it specifically stated that Congress could not address such inequality, as it was within the right of states to enact differing laws within the scope of their police powers: