466 HASTINGS—POLICE POWER OF THE STATE. [June 19, 
can governments and that such regulations had never been deemed a 
deprivation of the property involved within the meaning of this 
provision of Magna Charta and of the state constitutions. 
The claim that the owner is entitled to a reasonable compensa- 
tion for the use of his property, and that the question of what is a 
reasonable return is a judicial and not a legislative question, is met 
by an appeal to precedent again ; and again it is answered that it 
had been uniformly treated as belonging to the legislature. The 
chief justice admits that the power is liable to abuse, but declares 
the remedy for such abuse must be sought at the polls and not in 
the courts. 
The claim that the legislation was an infringement on the 
power of Congress to regulate interstate and foreign commerce is 
disposed of by saying that the elevator was not exclusively an 
instrument of such commerce ; that it must be considered as sub- 
ject to the local government in whose jurisdiction it stood ; and, 
unless the requirements of such local government clashed with 
congressional legislation as to commerce, any such requirements 
made in good faith, in exercise of the proper powers of local gov- 
ernment, must be upheld, even though they indirectly affected inter- 
state and foreign commerce. 
Justices Field and Strong dissented. They thought the business 
of storing grain a purely private one. As Judge Field says in 
the opinion: 
“The public are interested only as they are interested in the storage of 
other products of the soil or of manufacture.’ 
They thought the doctrine of the court might fairly be con- 
strued to mean that whenever a business was useful and therefore 
important to the public its compensation could be regulated : 
‘“The doctrine of the state court, that no one is deprived of his prop- 
erty within the meaning of the constitutional inhibition so long as he 
retains its title and possession, and the doctrine of this court, that when- 
ever one’s property is used in such a manner as to affect the public at 
large it becomes by that fact clothed with a public interest and ceases 
to be juris privati only, appear to me to destroy for all useful purposes 
the efficacy of the constitutional guaranty.” 
erhaps, in all the decisions which have been rendered upon 
this subject, the nature of the contest between the police power and 
the terms of the constitutions has never been brought out more 
