410 HASTINGS—POLICE POWER OF THE STATE. [June 19, 
recognizing the paramount importance of the states in the Ameri- 
can political situation of 1787 was indicated. His entire accuracy 
in describing the colonists as Englishmen isolated by the Atlantic 
and penetrated through and through with English institutions and 
English habits of thought, especially in matters of government and 
authority, must be conceded. Indeed, the common law of Eng- 
land plus the state organizations may be fairly stated to have been 
the political stock in trade of North America in 1787. 
It was natural that they should idealize that common law. 
Blackstone had recently set forth its main outlines in those Com- 
mentartes which still remain the only authoritative legal treatise in 
our language which is also literature. His work was more popular 
and more read in America than in England, and is said to have 
found actually more purchasers before 1800 on this side of the 
Atlantic than on the other. 
The terms in which the common law is referred to by judges and 
publicists of those days indicate that they regarded it as furnishing 
a practically complete system of civil and criminal justice. The 
author of the sixty-second paper of Zhe Federalist, *whether Madt- 
son or Hamilton, seems to have dreaded innovations rather than 
hoped for improvements by legislation. 
It needs no pointing out that this system had grown up with no 
conception of express constitutional limitations on the legislature. 
The older cases in all the state courts are based upon English pre- 
cedents. These precedents never suggest any question of lack of 
power in the legislature, and when legislative power began to be 
questioned it was questioned by way of a claim that the legislature 
was invading rights which had been respected at least, if not 
established, by common law decisions and which were claimed to be 
under the protection of the constitutions. ‘The newly introduced 
doctrines of restraint upon the legislature sought to shelter them- 
selves behind the venerable robe of the common law. ‘The spell 
that requires every crusade in Anglo-Saxon countries to be in- 
augurated under the guise of a vindication of ancient rights was 
over them also. An examination of the earlier cases commonly cited 
in discussions of this subject will show—like *Soper vs. Harvard Col- 
lege in Massachusetts in 1822, holding that an act forbidding livery- 
stable keepers to give credit to undergraduates of Harvard was a 
1 Federalist, No. 62, Lodge ed., p. 387. 
DISA apr 
