quents and offenders whose sins were once the care of the church and the home.

To show how in these various jurisdictions, in the performance of its arduous tasks, the law has sought to conform its judgments to the demands of sound economic and moral principles, I need not stop to review its progress in any given period of time. How, as civilization and freedom have advanced, improvements in our municipal law have steadily followed, is known to every student. What is law today was not law fifty or twenty-five or even ten years ago. Old principles have received new applications better suited to the requirements of the time, and thus in every branch of legal and equitable jurisprudence a constant change and improvement has gone on from year to year to meet conditions brought about by new discoveries, new inventions, new ideas and new facts.

I am going to ask your attention only to a few of the leading decisions of our highest court and to some important legislation, state and federal, which I think show how truly this has been the case.

Of course there are exceptions. There are some instances where courts, in passing upon legislation intended to remedy certain evils, have failed to meet the fair expectation of the people. But these instances are few, and the mistakes, when made, have been speedily remedied, either by a change in the decision of the court or by appropriate legislation.

In his famous essay on Liberty, Mr. Mill asserts "one very simple principle" as entitled to govern the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control. That is the principle of self protection-the principle that the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised by society over any of its members, against their will, is to prevent harm to others. The good of the individual himself, physical or moral, is not sufficient to warrant the exercise of such power. As to this, the individual himself is sovereign. According to this principle, the state ought not to undertake any duties which are or can be performed by individuals free

from state control. Under its operation, the largest measure of individual liberty and contractual freedom is allowed and the absolute right of the citizen to the use and enjoyment of his property secured. The state, it is true, may take the citizen's property for public purposes, upon just compensation, and also a portion of it by way of taxation for the support of the government; and it may control the use and possession of it as far as necessary for the protection of the rights of others, and to secure to them the equal use and enjoyment of their own, under the rule which requires every one so to use his own as not to injure another.

About the time Mr. Mill was asserting this principle in England, we in this country were getting ready to depart from it. It had been the theory upon which we had proceeded in our state and national governments for nearly one hundred years, and its application had met the conditions with which we were then confronted. But changes in our industrial and economic surroundings necessitated an enlargement of this principle, as well as new applications of many other old ones. From pioneers and woodsmen we rapidly became farmers and manufacturers, miners and inventors on a tremendous scale. We built cities where millions of people were crowded together. We spanned the continent with railroads, and discovered and applied steam and electricity to almost every conceivable use, working in commerce a revolution that we ourselves can scarcely yet comprehend. New forces and new problems beset us on every side and new subjects of legislation and new questions of law confronted the legislatures and the courts. The simple principle by which we had been governed in earlier days was found inadequate. Its strict application would not meet the requirements of the time nor satisfy the moral judgments of the people. Let us see how the legislatures and the courts have dealt with the changed conditions.

I believe it may be said with perfect truth that no courts of any land or of any age have ever been confronted with such a variety of difficult and weighty problems as have come

before the courts of the United States within the last fifty years, and that no courts have ever dealt with such controversies more wisely, more courageously, more faithfully and more consistently with the public good.

Nowhere is this more manifest than in the decisions of the courts relating to that most essential, insistent and least limitable of the powers of government, the police power of the states-the power that entitles the states and the states alone, subject only to the limitations of the Federal Constitution, to establish, regulate and control their own policies affecting their moral and industrial welfare and the safety, health and comfort of their citizens. From the great mass of decisions on this subject I wish to select as illustrating my position a few from the Supreme Court of the United States relating to the use of private property and to the freedom of contract.

For sixty years or more after the organization of our government we were chiefly an agricultural people. There was, it is true, considerable mining and manufacturing and some improvements in the means of transportation, but on the whole we were occupied chiefly with agricultural pursuits and with the task of clearing up and settling our vast territory. Under the pressure of circumstances attending the Revolution we had adopted the common law of England with its procedure, which was already known and used in this country and which we continued to use with little change for nearly a hundred years. Our means of transportation were chiefly the ox cart, the stage coach and the sailing vessel. An idea of the slowness of the times may be obtained when it is remembered that a hundred years ago it took more than seven weeks to convey to the City of Washington the news of the Treaty of Ghent, and that while the glad tidings were on the way General Jackson had ample time to plan and fight the Battle of New Orleans, in perfect ignorance of the fact that peace had been arranged.

It was a great period for the courts-fitly called the classical period of American jurisprudence-a period of much leisure, when things moved slowly and nobody hurried because

we had no way to hurry as hurrying is understood in this speed-loving day. The courts had plenty of time for argument and reflection and frequently took years in which to prepare their written opinions. The scope of their work compared with that which our modern judges have to do may be seen from the fact that one volume of the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States one hundred years ago contained opinions rendered during a period of fourteen months, while one volume in 1913 is filled with opinions rendered on a single day.

For twenty years before the Civil War we were absorbed in the consideration of the questions leading up to that struggle, and the five years following were given to solving the problems growing out of that war and the reconstruction era. Not until 1870 did the country begin to settle down to business. The Union Pacific Railroad had then been completed and other railroad systems were rapidly covering the North and West. A new industrial and economic era had arrived, and the legislatures and the courts were forced to deal with the changed conditions. Accordingly, in 1871, the legislature of Illinois, in pursuance of the power conferred upon it by the Constitution of that state, enacted a law fixing maximum charges for warehouses owned and conducted by private persons in that state for the storage of grain, and in 1874 the legislatures of Iowa and Wisconsin enacted laws fixing maximum freight and passenger rates for railroads. The enforcement of these statutes, intended to meet existing industrial conditions and protect the public against the oppressive use of property by railroads and warehouses then rapidly building in those states, was resisted as an unlawful interference with the use of private property and an unlawful attempt to regulate the conduct of private business; and thus in 1876, thirty-nine years ago, the great Granger Cases came before the Supreme Court of the United States.* While approved and supported by the farming and laboring classes,

*Munn vs. Illinois, Chicago, etc., R. R. Co. vs. Iowa, Peik vs. Chicago, etc., R. R. Co., 94 U. S.

the legislation involved in those suits was characterized by investors, stockholders and capitalists as meddlesome and vexatious in the extreme. It was prophesied that as long as it remained in force, foreign capital would invest no money in enterprises that might be subject to its arbitrary operation. The annotator tells us that counsel for the defendant companies, arguing the cases before the Supreme Court, referred scornfully to the "wild notion" that any such right of regulation as asserted by the statutes existed. They earnestly insisted that the charter rights of the railroad companies to manage and control their own property were inviolable under the decision in the Dartmouth College Case and effectually protected them against the interference of any legislative power whatever. Counsel for the Warehouse Company, we are told, were unsparing in their ridicule of this "amazing" legislation. To them the proposition that the public might regulate the traffic charges of railroads was startling enough. Still, the railroads received their charters from the state and exercised the power of eminent domain and were accorded certain special franchises and privileges, in return for which the public might well have a right to impose regulations on them. But to attempt to regulate the business of a private warehouse, owned by private individuals, situated upon private ground, and enjoying no public rights, franchises or immunities whatever, by limiting the prices to be charged by it and subjecting its owners to the onerous requirements prescribed by the statutes-that indeed seemed an astounding proposition. "Was it a Solon or a Draco," they sarcastically inquired, "to whom this brilliant idea of changing the status of all private property in warehouses throughout the State of Illinois, first presented itself in all its loveliness?"

You know the decision of the court. The statutes were upheld and the court once for all settled the doctrine in this country that whenever the owner of property devotes it to a use in which the public has an interest, he grants to the public an interest in such use and to that extent must submit to be controlled by the public for the common good. And