1900.] HASTINGS—POLICE POWER OF THE STATE. 469 
‘call laws creating corportations may be altered or repealed by the legis- 
lature at any time after their passage,” 
applied to a statute passed before such constitution, but whose 
provisions were not accepted until after such passage was affirmed. 
This was the last of these Granger cases and Judge Field, with 
whom concurred Judge Strong, filed a dissenting opinion, that by 
the result of these cases the railroad companies were ‘‘ practically 
placed at the mercy of the legislature of every state.’’ They 
argued against the result as destroying the value of bonds and 
mortgages and impairing the obligations of contract, but again 
without suggesting the true limit between spoliation and regulation. 
In fact, no question of such distinction was raised in these cases. 
The plaintiff roads were resisting all regulation of rates. 
That much of the alarm of corporate capital at this extension 
or, at least, assertion of police power in the states, was due to these 
dissenting opinions, which, be it remarked, found no fault with the 
justice of the result reached in these individual instances, seems 
clear. In truth, the cases were not instances of oppression ap- 
pealed against by the roads. It is impossible not to recognize at 
once, in their varied character, in the different roads involved, the 
questions raised and the manner of objections, that they were 
brought by the great lines of the Northwest under a more or less 
conscious prearrangement, not by way of resisting actual oppres- 
sion, but to procure from the Supreme Court of the United States 
an expression limiting the powers of the state legislatures and set- 
ting these great interests substantially above such powers. 
Actual hardship was in no case seriously attempted to be shown. 
It appears clearly enough that to be required to show any hardship 
was deemed a most serious one by the corporate interests involved. 
That the court under such circumstances asserted in emphatic 
terms the authority of the legislature’ was a great public service. 
If it did so somewhat too strongly it is to be remembered that the 
time to assert limiting doctrines is when the legislative authority 
has been established and is really abused or threatened to be. 
The following year, in *Shields vs. Ohio, the right of the state to 
prescribe a maximum rate came again before the court under a 
slightly different phase. ‘Two companies had consolidated, one of 
which by its charter was exempt from such legislation, and one not. 
ido Ci S:, 319) (1877). 
