370 HASTINGS—POLICE POWER OF THE STATE. [June 19, 
states as against that of the general government. In fact, his only 
serious objection to Judge Barbour’s reasoning is that it results in 
his finding an authority in the state ‘‘complete, unqualified and 
exclusive.”’ 
The reviewer does not use or note the phrase ‘‘ police power.’’ 
This review, like the opinions filed in the case, shows how far the 
phrase still was from occupying the field. The famous case of 
‘Charles River Bridge vs. Warren Bridge furnishes a still stronger 
proof that the phrase had not yet established its position. This 
case, as above stated, appeared also in the eleventh volume of 
Peters’ Reports. Chief Justice Taney’s opinion of the court, with 
Justice McLean’s concurring opinion on the ground of want of 
jurisdiction and the dissenting opinion of Judge Story altogether 
cover one hundred and fourteen pages of the book. The court is 
believed to have intended to set up the police power, as since un- 
derstood, to serve as a limit upon the doctrine of the Dartmouth Col- 
lege case. The holding is that a state charter to a bridge company 
which does not in terms grant any exclusive rights cannot be con- 
strued into a contract on the part of the state not to make or 
authorize to be made another bridge over the same stream in the 
immediate vicinity of the first, nor to prevent the turning of the 
second bridge into a free public one to the ruin of all value in the 
first franchise. 
The powers of legislation left with the states, and the relation of 
those powers to the prohibition in the federal constitution against 
the impairing on the part of any state of the obligation of con- 
tracts, is the subject of Chief Justice Taney’s profound investiga- 
tion. Perhaps they have never been set forth in better or more 
impressive terms. But the nearest he comes to using the phrase 
“** police power’’ is in this statement : 
““We cannot deal thus with the rights reserved to the states and by legal 
intendments and mere technical reasoning take away from them any 
portion of that power over their own internal police and improvement 
which is so necessary to their well-being and prosperity.’”” 
With the question whether vested rights were disturbed the court 
declines to concern itself under the constitution as it then existed. 
The other opinions in the great Bridge case contained nothing 
even suggesting the name by which this power is now known. 
171 Pet., 420 (1837). 211 Pe. 552. 
