Contemporary American History, 1877-1913 Part 3

Not many of them were great orators or widely known as profound students of politics in its historical and comparative aspects. A few, like Blaine, h.o.a.r, and Conkling, studied the cla.s.sic oratory of the older generation and sought to apply to the controverted issues of the hour that studious, orderly, and sustained eloquence which had adorned the debates of earlier years; but the major portion cultivated only the arts of management and negotiation. Few of them seem to have given any thought to the lessons to be learned from European politics. On the contrary, they apparently joined with the mult.i.tude in the a.s.sumption that we had everything to teach Europe and nothing to learn. Bismarck was to them, if we may judge from their spoken words, simply a great politician and the hero of a war; the writings of German economists, Wagner and Schmoller, appear never to have penetrated their studies.

That they foresaw in the seventies and eighties the turn that politics was destined to take is nowhere evident. They commanded respect and admiration for their practical achievements; but it is questionable whether the names of more than two or three will be known a century hence, save to the antiquarian.

Of this group, Roscoe Conkling was undoubtedly typical, just as Marcus A. Hanna represented the dominant politicians of a later time. He was an able lawyer and an orator of some quality, but of no permanent fame. He took his seat in the Senate in 1867 and according to his biographer "during the remainder of his life his legal practice was chiefly connected with corporations that were litigants in the district and circuit courts of the United States,"[13]--the judges of which courts he was, as Senator, instrumental in appointing. His practice was lucrative for his day, amounting to some $50,000 a year.[14] He counted among his clients the first great capitalists of the country. When he was forced to retire from New York politics, "the first person who came to see him on business was Mr. Jay Gould, who waited upon him early one morning at his hotel."[15] He was counsel for Mr. Collis P. Huntington in his contest against the state legislation which railway interests deemed unjust and unconst.i.tutional.[16] He was among the keen group of legal thinkers who invoked and extended the principle of the Fourteenth Amendment to cover all the varieties of legislation affecting corporate interests adversely.[17]

Criticism of the Republican party, and particularly of the policies for which he stood, Mr. Conkling regarded as little short of treason. For example, when Mr. George William Curtis, in the New York state convention of 1877, sought to endorse the administration of President Hayes, whose independence in office had been troublesome to Mr.

Conkling, the latter returned in a pa.s.sionate attack on the whole party of opposition: "Who are these men who in newspapers and elsewhere are 'cracking their whips' over Republicans and playing schoolmaster to the Republican party and its conscience and convictions. They are of various sorts and conditions. Some of them are the man-milliners, the dilettanti and carpet knights of politics, men whose efforts have been expended in denouncing and ridiculing and accusing honest men.... Some of these worthies masquerade as reformers and their vocation and ministry is to lament the sins of other people. Their stock in trade is rancid, canting self-righteousness. They are wolves in sheep's clothing. Their real object is office and plunder. When Dr. Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, he was then unconscious of the then undeveloped capabilities of the word 'reform.'"[18]

The political philosophy of this notable group of political leaders was that of their contemporaries in England, the Cobden-Bright school. They believed in the widest possible extension of the principle of private property, and the narrowest possible restriction of state interference, except to aid private property to increase its gains. They held that all of the natural resources of the country should be transferred to private hands as speedily as possible, at a nominal charge, or no charge at all, and developed with dashing rapidity. They also believed that the great intangible social property created by community life, such as franchises for street railways, gas, and electricity, should be transformed into private property. They supplemented their philosophy of property by a philosophy of law and politics, which looked upon state interference, except to preserve order, and aid railways and manufacturers in their enterprises, as an intrinsic evil to be resisted at every point, and they developed a system of jurisprudence which, as Senators having the confirming power in appointments and as counsel for corporations before the courts of the United States, they succeeded in transforming into judicial decisions. Some of them were doubtless corrupt, as was constantly charged, but the real explanation of their resistance to government intervention is to be found in their philosophy, which, although consonant with their private interests, they identified with public good.

_Writing Laissez Faire into the Const.i.tution_

Inasmuch as the attacks on private rights in property, franchises, and corporate privileges came princ.i.p.ally from the state legislatures, it was necessary to find some way to subject them to legal control--some juristic process for translating _laissez faire_ into a real restraining force. These leading statesmen and lawyers were not long in finding the way. The Federal courts were obviously the proper instrumentalities, and the broad restrictions laid upon the states by the Fourteenth Amendment no less obviously afforded the const.i.tutional foundation for the science of legislative nihilism. "No state," ran the significant words of that Amendment, "shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

What unseen implications lay within these phrases the most penetrating thinkers divined at once. Protest was made by the New Jersey legislature against the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866 on the ground that it would destroy all the essential rights of a state to control its internal affairs; and such opinion was widespread. But the most common view was to the effect that the Amendment would be used princ.i.p.ally to surround the newly emanc.i.p.ated slaves with safeguards against their former masters who might be tempted to restore serfdom under apprentice and penal laws and other legal guises. Still there is plenty of evidence to show that those who framed the Fourteenth Amendment and pushed it through Congress had in mind a far wider purpose--that of providing a general restraining clause for state legislatures.

The problem of how best to check the a.s.saults of state legislatures on vested rights was not new when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted. On the contrary, it was one of the first concerns of the Convention of 1787 which drafted the original Const.i.tution of the United States, and it was thought by the framers that security had been attained by forbidding states to emit bills of credit and make laws impairing the obligation of contract. Under Chief Justice Marshall, these clauses were so generously interpreted as to repel almost any attack which a state legislature might make on acquired rights. However, in the closing years of Marshall's service, the Supreme Court, then pa.s.sing into the hands of states' rights justices, rendered an opinion in the case of Ogden _v._ Saunders, which clearly held that the contract clause did not prevent the legislature from stipulating that _future_ contracts might be practically at its mercy. When a legislature provides by general law that all charters of corporations are subject to repeal and alteration, such provision becomes a part of all new contracts. Marshall delivered in this case a vigorous and cogent dissenting opinion in which he pointed out that the decision had in effect destroyed the virtue of the obligation of contract clause.

The case of Ogden _v._ Saunders was decided in 1827. Between that year and the Civil War the beginnings of corporate enterprise were securely laid in the United States; and the legislatures of the several states began the regulation of corporations from one motive or another, sometimes for the purpose of blackmailing them and sometimes for the laudable purpose of protecting public interests. At all events, large propertied concerns began to feel that they could not have a free hand in developing their enterprises or enjoy any genuine security unless the legislatures of the states were, by some const.i.tutional provision, brought again under strict Federal judicial control.

The opportunity to secure this judicial control was afforded during the Civil War when the radical Republicans were demanding Federal protection for the newly emanc.i.p.ated slaves of the South. The drastic legislation relative to negroes adopted by the southern states at the close of the War showed that even in spite of the Thirteenth Amendment a substantial bondage could be reestablished under the color of criminal, apprentice, and vagrant legislation. The friends of the negroes, therefore, determined to put the substantial rights of life, liberty, and property beyond the interference of state legislatures forever, and secure to all persons the equal protection of the law.

Accordingly, the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, enunciating the broad legal and political doctrine that no state "shall abridge the privileges or immunity of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any _person_ of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any _person_ within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law."

Here was a restriction laid upon state legislatures which might be substantially limitless in its application, in the hands of a judiciary wishing to place the broadest possible interpretation upon it. What are privileges and immunities? What are life, liberty, and property? What is due process of law? What is the equal protection of the law? Does the term "person" include not only natural persons but also artificial persons, namely, corporations? That the reconstruction committee of Congress which framed the instrument intended to include within the scope of this generous provision not only the negro struggling upward from bondage, but also corporations and business interests struggling for emanc.i.p.ation from legislative interference, has been often a.s.serted.

In arguing before the Supreme Court in the San Matteo County case, on December 19, 1882, Mr. Roscoe Conkling, who had been a member of the committee which drafted the Fourteenth Amendment, unfolded for the first time the deep purpose of the committee, and showed from the journal of that committee that it was not their intention to confine the amendment merely to the protection of the colored race. In the course of his argument, Mr. Conkling remarked, "At the time the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, as the records of the two Houses will show, individuals and joint-stock companies were appealing for congressional and administrative protection against invidious and discriminating state and local taxes. One instance was that of an express company, whose stock was owned largely by citizens of the State of New York, who came with pet.i.tions and bills seeking Acts of Congress to aid them in resisting what they deemed oppressive taxation in two states, and oppressive and ruinous rules of damages applied under state laws. That complaints of oppression in respect of property and other rights, made by citizens of Northern States who took up residence in the South, were rife, in and out of Congress, none of us can forget; that complaints of oppression in various forms, of white men in the South,--of 'Union men,'--were heard on every side, I need not remind the Court. The war and its results, the condition of the freedmen, and the manifest duty owed to them, no doubt brought on the occasion for const.i.tutional amendment; but when the occasion came and men set themselves to the task, the acc.u.mulated evils falling within the purview of the work were the surrounding circ.u.mstances, in the light of which they strove to increase and strengthen the safeguards of the Const.i.tution and laws."[19]

In spite of important testimony to the effect that those who drafted the Fourteenth Amendment really intended "to nationalize liberty," that is _laissez faire_, against state legislatures, the Supreme Court at first refused to accept this broad interpretation, and it was not until after several of the judges of the old states' rights school had been replaced by judges of the new school that the claims of Mr. Conkling's group as to the Fourteenth Amendment were embodied in copious judicial decisions.

_The Slaughter-House Cases_

The first judicial interpretation of the significant phrases of the Fourteenth Amendment which were afterward to be the basis of judicial control over state economic legislation of every kind was made by the Supreme Court in the Slaughter-House cases in 1873--five years after that Amendment had been formally ratified. These particular cases, it is interesting to note, like practically all other important cases arising under the Fourteenth Amendment, had no relation whatever to the newly emanc.i.p.ated slaves; but, on the contrary, dealt with the regulation of business enterprises.

In 1869, the legislature of Louisiana pa.s.sed an act designed to protect the health of the people of New Orleans and certain other parishes. This act created a corporation for the purpose of slaughtering animals within that city, forbade the establishment of any other slaughterhouses or abattoirs within the munic.i.p.ality, and conferred the sole and exclusive privilege of conducting the live-stock landing and slaughterhouse business, under the limitations of the act, upon the company thus created. The company, however, was required by the law to permit any persons who wished to do so to slaughter in its houses and to make full provision for all such slaughtering at a reasonable compensation. This drastic measure, the report of the case states, was denounced "not only as creating a monopoly and conferring odious and exclusive privileges upon a small number of persons at the expense of the great body of the community of New Orleans, but ... it deprives a large and meritorious cla.s.s of citizens--the whole of the butchers of the city--of the right to exercise their trade, the business to which they have been trained and on which they depend for the support of themselves and their families."

The opinion of the court was rendered by Mr. Justice Miller. The Justice opened by making a few remarks upon the "police power," in the course of which he said that the regulation of slaughtering fell within the borders of that mysterious domain and without doubt const.i.tuted one of the powers enjoyed by all states previous to the adoption of the Civil War amendments. After commenting upon the great responsibility devolved upon the Court in construing the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments and remarking on the careful deliberation with which the judges had arrived at their conclusions, Justice Miller then turned to an examination of the historical purpose which underlay the adoption of the amendments in question. After his recapitulation of recent events, he concluded: "On the most casual examination of the language of these amendments, no one can fail to be impressed with the one pervading purpose found in them all, lying at the foundation of each, and without which none of them would have been even suggested; we mean the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the newly-made freeman and citizen from the oppression of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him. It is true that only the Fifteenth Amendment, in terms, mentions the negro by speaking of his color and his slavery. But it is just as true that each of the other articles was addressed to the grievances of that race and designed to remedy them as the Fifteenth. We do not say that no one else but the negro can share in this protection. Both the language and spirit of these articles are to have their fair and just weight in any question of construction.... What we do wish to say and what we wish to be understood as saying is, that in any fair and just construction of any section or phrase of these amendments, it is necessary to look to the purpose, which as we have said was the pervading spirit of them all, the evil which they were designed to remedy, and the process of continued addition to the Const.i.tution until that purpose was supposed to be accomplished as far as const.i.tutional law can accomplish it."

Justice Miller dismissed with a tone of impatience the idea of the counsel for the plaintiffs in error that the Louisiana statute in question imposed an "involuntary servitude" forbidden by the Thirteenth Amendment. "To withdraw the mind," he said, "from the contemplation of this grand yet simple declaration of the personal freedom of all the human race within the jurisdiction of this government--a declaration designed to establish the freedom of four million slaves--and with a microscopic search endeavor to find it in reference to servitudes which may have been attached to property in certain localities, requires an effort, to say the least of it."

In Justice Miller's long opinion there is no hint of that larger and more comprehensive purpose entertained by the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment which was a.s.serted by Mr. Conkling a few years later in his argument before the Supreme Court. If he was aware that the framers had in mind not only the protection of the freedmen in their newly won rights, but also the defense of corporations and business enterprises generally against state legislation, he gave no indication of the fact.

There is nowhere in his opinion any sign that he saw the broad economic implications of the Amendment which he was expounding for the first time in the name of the Court. On the contrary, his language and the opinion reached in the case show that the judges were either not cognizant of the new economic and political duty placed upon them, or, in memory of the states' rights traditions which they had entertained, were unwilling to apply the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments in such a manner as narrowly to restrict the legislative power of a commonwealth.

In taking up that clause of the Fourteenth Amendment which provides that no state shall make or enforce any law abridging the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, Justice Miller declared that it was not the purpose of that provision to transfer the security and protection of all fundamental civil rights from the state government to the Federal Government. A citizen of the United States as such, he said, has certain privileges and immunities, and _it was these and these only_ which the Fourteenth Amendment contemplated. He enumerated some of them: the right of the citizen to come to the seat of government, to a.s.sert any claim he may have upon that government, to transact any business he may have with it, to seek its protection, share its offices, engage in administering its functions, to have free access to its seaports, subtreasuries, land offices, and courts of justice, to use the navigable waters of the United States, to a.s.semble peaceably with his fellow citizens and pet.i.tion for redress of grievances, and to enjoy the privileges of the writ of habeas corpus. It was rights of this character, the learned justice argued, and not all the fundamental rights of person and property which had been acquired in the evolution of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, that were placed by the Fourteenth Amendment under the protection of the Federal Government.

Within this view, all the ordinary civil rights enjoyed by citizens were still within the control of the organs of the state government and not within Federal protection at all. If the privileges and immunities, brought within the protection of the Federal Government by the Fourteenth Amendment, were intended to embrace the whole domain of personal and property rights, then, contended the justice, the Supreme Court would be const.i.tuted "a perpetual censor upon all legislation of the states, on the civil rights of their own citizens, with authority to nullify such as it did not approve as consistent with those rights as they existed at the time of the adoption of this Amendment.... We are convinced that no such results were intended by the Congress which proposed these amendments nor by the legislatures which ratified them."

In two short paragraphs, Justice Miller disposed of the contention of the plaintiffs in error to the effect that the Louisiana statute deprived the plaintiffs of their property without due process of law. He remarked that inasmuch as the phraseology of this clause was also to be found in the Fifth Amendment and in some form in the const.i.tutions of nearly all of the states, it had received satisfactory judicial interpretation; "and it is sufficient to say," he concluded on this point, "that under no construction of that provision that we have ever seen or any that we deem admissible, can the restraint imposed by the state of Louisiana upon the exercise of their trade by the butchers of New Orleans be held to be a deprivation of private property within the meaning of that provision."

Coming now to that clause requiring every state to give all persons within its jurisdiction equal protection of the laws, Justice Miller indulged in the false prophecy: "We doubt very much whether any action of a state not directed by way of discrimination against the negroes as a cla.s.s or on account of their race will ever be held to come within the purview of this provision." An emergency might arise, he admitted, but he found no such a one in the case before him.

Concluding his opinion, he expressed the view that the American Federal system had come out of the Civil War with its main features unchanged, and that it was the duty of the Supreme Court then as always to hold with a steady and an even hand the balance between state and Federal power. "Under the pressure of all the excited feeling growing out of the War," he remarked, "our statesmen have still believed that the existence of the states with powers for domestic and local government, including the regulation of civil rights--the rights of person and property--was essential to the perfect working of our complex form of government, though they have thought proper to impose additional limitations upon the states and to confer additional power on that of the nation."

Under this strict interpretation of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments, all the fundamental rights of persons and property remained subject to the state governments substantially in the same way as before the Civil War. The Supreme Court thus could not become the final arbiter and control the social and economic legislation of states at every point. Those champions of the amendments who looked to them to establish Federal judicial supremacy for the defense of corporations and business enterprises everywhere throughout the American empire were sadly disappointed.

Nowhere was that disappointment more effectively and more cogently stated than in the opinions of the judges who dissented from the doctrines announced by the majority of the court. Chief Justice Chase and Justices Field, Bradley, and Swayne refused to accept the interpretation and the conclusions reached by the majority, and the last three judges wrote separate opinions of their own expressing their grounds for dissenting. The first of these, Justice Field, contended that the Louisiana statute in question could not legitimately come under the police power and was in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, inasmuch as it denied to citizens of the United States the fundamental rights which belonged to citizens of all free governments--protection against monopolies and equality of rights in the pursuit of the ordinary avocations of life. In his opinion, the privileges and immunities put under the supervision of the Federal Government by the Fourteenth Amendment comprised generally "protection by the government, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the right to acquire and possess property of every kind, and to pursue and obtain happiness and safety, subject, nevertheless, to such restraint as the government may justly prescribe for the general good of the whole." In other words, Justice Field would have carried the Amendment beyond the specific enumeration of any definitely ascertained legal rights into the field of moral law, which, in final a.n.a.lysis, would have meant the subjection of the state legislation solely to the discretion of the judicial conscience. The future, as we shall see, was with Justice Field.

In the opinion of Justice Bradley, the Louisiana statute not only deprived persons of the equal protection of the laws, but also of liberty and property--the right of choosing, in the adoption of lawful employments, being a portion of their liberty, and their occupation being their property. In the opinion of Mr. Justice Swayne, who dissented also, the word liberty as used in the Fourteenth Amendment embodied freedom from all restraints except such as were "justly"

imposed by law. In his view, property included everything that had an exchange value, including labor, and the right to make property available was next in importance to the rights of life and liberty.

_The Granger Cases_

Three years after the decision in the Slaughter-House cases, the Supreme Court again refused to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment so broadly as to hold unconst.i.tutional a state statute regulating business undertakings. This case, Munn _v._ Illinois, decided in 1876, involved the validity of a statute pa.s.sed under the const.i.tution of that state, which declared all elevators where grain was stored to be public warehouses and subjected them to strict regulation, including the establishment of fixed maximum charges. It was contended by the plaintiffs in error, Munn and Scott, that the statute violated the Fourteenth Amendment in two respects: (1) that the business attempted to be regulated was not a public calling and was, therefore, totally outside of the regulatory or police power of the state; and (2) that even if the business was conceded to be public in character, and therefore by the rule of the common law was permitted to exact only "reasonable" charges for its services, nevertheless the determination of what was reasonable belonged to the judicial branch of the government and could not be made by the legislature without violating the principle of "due process."

Both of these contentions were rejected by the Court, and the const.i.tutionality of the Illinois statute was upheld. The opinion of the Court was written by Chief Justice Waite, who undertook an elaborate examination of the "due process" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The principle of this Amendment, he said, though new in the Const.i.tution of the United States, is as old as civilized government itself; it is found in Magna Carta in substance if not in form, in nearly all of the state const.i.tutions, and in the Fifth Amendment to the Federal Const.i.tution.

In order to ascertain, therefore, what power legislatures enjoyed under the new amendment, it was only necessary to inquire into the limitations which had been historically imposed under the due process clause in England and the United States; and after an examination of some cases in point the Chief Justice came to the conclusion that "down to the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment it was not supposed that statutes regulating the use or even the price of the use of private property necessarily deprived an owner of his property without due process of law." When private property "is affected with public interest" and is used in a manner to make it of public consequence, the public is in fact granted an interest in that use, and the owner of the property in question "must submit to be controlled by the public for the common good, to the extent of the interest he has thus created."

But it was insisted on behalf of the plaintiffs that the owner of property is ent.i.tled to a reasonable compensation for its use even when it is clothed with the public interest, and that the determination of what is reasonable is a _judicial, not a legislative_, matter. To this Chief Justice Waite replied that the usual practice had been otherwise.

"In countries where the common law prevails," he said, "it has been customary from time immemorial for the legislature to declare what shall be a reasonable compensation under such circ.u.mstances, or perhaps more properly speaking to fix a maximum beyond which any charge made would be unreasonable.... The controlling fact is the power to regulate at all.

If that exists, the right to establish the maximum of charge as one of the means of regulation is implied. In fact, the common law rule which requires the charge to be reasonable is itself a regulation as to price.... To limit the rate of charge for services rendered in a public employment, or for the use of property in which the public has an interest, is only changing a regulation which existed before. It establishes no new principle in the law, but only gives a new effect to an old one. We know that this is a power which may be abused; but that is no argument against its existence. _For protection against abuses by legislatures the people must resort to the polls, not to the courts._"[20]

The principle involved in the Munn case also came up in the same year (1876) in Peik _v._ Chicago and Northwestern Railroad Company, in which Chief Justice Waite, speaking of an act of Wisconsin limiting pa.s.senger and freight charges on railroads in the state, said: "As to the claim that the courts must decide what is reasonable and not the legislature, this is not new to this case. It has been fully considered in Munn _v._ Illinois. Where property has been clothed with a public interest, the legislature may fix a limit to that which shall be in law reasonable for its use. This limit binds the courts as well as the people. If it has been improperly fixed, the legislature, not the courts, must be appealed to for the change."

The total results of the several Granger cases, decided in 1876, may be summed up as follows:

(1) That the regulatory power of the state over "public callings" is not limited to those businesses over which it was exercised at common law, but extends to any business in which, because of its necessary character and the possibilities for extortion afforded by monopolistic control, the public has an interest.

(2) That such regulatory power will not be presumed to have been contracted away by any legislature, unless such intention is unequivocally expressed.

(3) That the exercise of such regulatory power belongs to the legislature, and not to the judiciary.

(4) And the _dictum_ that the judiciary can grant no relief from an unjust exercise of this regulatory power by the legislature.

Although the denial of the right of the judiciary to review the "reasonableness" of a rate fixed by the legislature in the Granger cases had been _dictum_, a case was not long arising in which the issue was squarely raised. Had this case gone to the Supreme Court, the question of judicial review would have been decided a full decade or more before it really was. In this case, the Tilley case, a bondholder of a railroad operating in Georgia sought to restrain the railroad from putting into force a tariff fixed by the state railroad commission, on the ground that it was so unreasonably low as to be confiscatory. Judge Woods, of the Federal circuit court, refused to grant the injunction, basing his decision squarely upon the dictum in Munn _v._ Illinois, and declaring that the railroad must seek relief from unjust action on the part of the commission at the hands of the legislature or of the people.

It was not till seven years after the Granger cases that another case involving rate regulation was presented to the Federal courts.[21] The Ruggles case, brought to the Supreme Court by writ of error to the supreme court of Illinois, in 1883, involved a conviction of one of the agents of the Illinois Central Railway for violating a maximum pa.s.senger fare statute of that state, and raised substantially the same question as all of the Granger cases except the Munn case--the right of the legislature to regulate the rates of a railroad which was itself empowered by its charter to fix its own rates. The Court affirmed the doctrine of the Granger cases, Chief Justice Waite again writing the opinion. The case is noteworthy only for the opinion of Justice Harlan, concurring in the judgment, but dissenting from the opinion, of the Court, in so far as that opinion expressed, as he declared, the doctrine that the legislature of Illinois could regulate the rates of the railway concerned, in any manner it saw fit. Justice Harlan argued that inasmuch as the charter of the railroad had conferred upon it the right to demand "reasonable" charges, the legislature, when it resumed the power of fixing charges, was estopped from fixing less than "reasonable" charges; and should charges lower than "reasonable" be fixed, it would be within the province of the judicial branch to give relief against such an impairment of the obligation of contract.

Justice Harlan's opinion is interesting not only because it touches upon the possibility of a _judicial_ review of the rate fixed by the legislature; but because the learned Justice bases his contention on the _contract_ between the railroad and the state to the effect that rates should be "reasonable." This indicates plainly that not even in the mind of Justice Harlan, who later became the firm exponent of the power of judicial review, was there any clear belief that the Fourteenth Amendment as such gave the Court any power to review the "reasonableness" of a rate fixed by the legislature. In other words, he derived his doctrine of judicial review from the power of the Federal judiciary to enforce the obligation of contracts, and not from its power to compel "due process of law."

It is impossible to trace here the numerous decisions following the Ruggles case in which the Supreme Court was called upon to consider the power of state legislatures to control and regulate corporations, particularly railways. It is impossible also to follow out all of the fine and subtle distinctions by which the _dictum_ of Chief Justice Waite, in the Munn case, to the effect that private parties must appeal to the people, and not to the courts, for protection against state legislatures, was supplanted by the firm interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment in such a manner as to confer upon the courts the final power to review all state legislation regulating the use of property and labor. Of course we do not have, in fact, this clear-cut reversal of opinion by the Court, but rather a slow working out of the doctrine of judicial review as opposed to an implication that the Court could not grant to corporations the relief from legislative interference which they sought. There are but few clear-cut reversals in law; but the political effect of the Court's decisions has been none the less clear and positive.

_The Minnesota Rate Case_

It seems desirable, however, to indicate some of the leading steps by which the Court moved from the doctrine of non-interference with state legislatures to the doctrine that it is charged with the high duty of reviewing all and every kind of economic legislation by the states. One of the leading cases in this momentous transition is that of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railway Company _v._ Minnesota, decided in 1889, which made a heavy contribution to the doctrine of judicial review of questions of political economy as well as law. This case involved the validity of a Minnesota law which conferred upon a state railway commission the power to fix "reasonable" rates. The commission, acting under this authority, had fixed a rate on the transportation of milk between two points.

The railroad having refused to put the rate into effect, the commission applied to the supreme court of the state for a writ of mandamus. In its answer the railroad claimed, among other contentions, that the rate fixed was unreasonably low. The supreme court of the state refused to listen to this contention, saying that the statute by its terms made the order of the commission conclusively reasonable; accordingly it issued the mandamus. By writ of error, the case was brought to the Supreme Court of the United States, which, by a vote of six to three, ordered the decree of the state court vacated, on the ground that the statute as construed by the supreme court of the state was unconst.i.tutional, as a deprivation of property without due process of law.