490 HASTINGS—POLICE POWER OF THE STATE. [June 19, 
regulations, established by law, as the legislature, under the government 
and controlling power vested in them by the constitution, may think 
necessary and expedient.” 
He proceeds to say that he is not referring to the right of eminent 
domain : 
“The power we allude to is rather the police power, the power vested 
in the legislature to make, ordain and establish all manner of whole- 
some and reasonable laws, statutes and ordinances, either with penalties 
or without, not repugnant to the constitution, as they shall judge to be 
for the good and welfare of the commonwealth and of the subjects of 
the same.” 
It is to be remembered that the chief justice is applying to legis- 
lative action that Massachusetts constitution mainly prepared by 
John Adams and thought by him to represent ‘‘ Locke, Sidney, 
Rousseau and De Mably, all combined and reduced to practice.’’? 
That constitution declared in the plainest terms the sacredness 
of ? property rights, as against both citizen and state. The declar- 
ation of rights came first in that constitution, and closes appropri- 
ately with an attempt at providing a complete separation of the 
three powers of government—legislative, executive and judicial— 
to the ‘‘end it may be a government of laws and not of men.’’® 
It was fitting that its declaration of rights should conclude with this 
sentiment of Harrington’s. That constitution when originally 
adopted contained property qualifications for the exercising the right 
of suffrage. According to Harrington’s well-known theory, which 
Webster was accused of holding, property was the true basis and 
the upholding of it the chief end of government. 
It was also fitting, and indeed certain, that just where the con- 
stitutional protection of property was most strenuously declared, it 
would first come distinctly into collision with the assertion of gov- 
ernmental ‘‘indefinite supremacy.’’ Judge Shaw had in 1846, in 
the case of the *Commonwealth vs. Tewksbury, applied the maxim 
“« Sic utere tuo ut alienum non ledas,’’ and had held that a statute 
prohibiting the removal of stones, gravel or sand from the beaches 
in the town of Chelsea was valid. In doing so he made extensive 
use of English precedents. He made no use of the term police power 
in his opinion in that case, though it seems to have been referred 
14 Adams’ Works, 216. 31 Poore’s Charters, 949. 
2 Declaration of Rights, Sec. Io. 477 Met.,55. 
