1900.] HASTINGS—POLICE POWER OF THE STATE. 437 
case of the following term it is not necessary for us to venture. 
Both Chief Justice Taney and Judge Curtis, in passing upon that 
case, discuss, incidentally, the police power of the states, but that 
case added nothing to the subject. It only sufficed to remove for 
a while the discussion of the police power from the federal Supreme 
Court, and led to its exemplification elsewhere in the form of 
* military law. 
When the country was taking its citizens by hundreds of thou- 
sands and placing them in front of hostile cannon, was destroying 
lives and property with a rapidity unexampled in history, and 
popular enthusiasm was urging it on to greater sacrifices of either 
or both, if only the fabric of the nation might stand, secure and tri- 
umphant over all its enemies, there was not much opportunity or 
disposition to discuss police or question the rights by which gov- 
ernment does things. 
In the years just prior to the war the contest over prohibitory 
liquor laws was determined in most of the states along the same 
lines of upholding state authority where it has since rested. The 
right to control chartered corporation when necessary became 
established in accordance with the views of the cases already cited. 
Thorpe vs. Rutland, Etc., Ry. Co. remained, perhaps, the most 
influential, and is the case usually cited as laying the foundation 
for the doctrine that the police power cannot be alienated. On 
the basis reached in these years, 1856, 1857 and 1858, the police 
power remained until the ordinary machinery of the law com- 
menced its work again in those regions of the country where it 
had been with other laws ‘‘ silent amid the shock of arms.”’ 
As showing how the development of the police power was re- 
lated to the growth of constitutionalism and as showing the latter’s 
dependence upon ability to throw aside precedents, the California 
habeas corpus case, in 1858, ?ex parte Newman, with its dissent- 
ing opinion by Judge Field, later of the United States Supreme 
Court, is interesting. 
The applicant for a release was an Israelite convicted of a viola- 
tion of a not very stringent law of California for the ‘‘ better 
observance of the Sabbath.’’ He pleaded that his religion conse- 
crated the seventh day, and that the law was in conflict with a 
provision of the state constitution that all persons should have 
1 Hare’s Am. Con. Law, 761-784. 
49 Cal,, 503. 
