478 HASTINGS—POLICE POWER OF THE STATE. [June 19, 
limitation of the police power, citing * Beer Co. vs. Massachusetts. 
Justice Miller concurred for the former reason, and because he 
thought the ordinance left the company room enough still to carry 
out the terms of the charter outside of the village and within the 
boundaries fixed by law. Justice Strong dissented altogether. He 
shows, as it would seem unanswerably, that the company was author- 
ized by the state to carry on its business at amy point south of a 
certain line in Cook county for fifty years; that it had its business 
located and its arrangements made under this franchise, and to 
carry on this business it was necessary to do things which the ordi- 
nance forbade. He thought the state could not authorize its 
municipality to prevent the very thing which the state itself had 
agreed to permit, without impairing the obligation of the contract 
in the charter. He repudiated the second ground of the decision 
in Beer Co. vs. Massachusetts, and was for applying undiluted the 
doctrine of the Dartmouth College case. 
He seems to have stood alone among the judges. The case has 
been and is upheld, but it can only be upon the ground that the 
Dartmouth College case is modified to the extent that a charter 
is never to be construed to grant away the police power of the 
state enacting it. While the police power still remains as indefinite 
a term as the courts have heretofore made it, it is evident that a 
large portion of the Dartmouth College case is shorn away. 
In the case of ? Transportation Co. vs. Chicago the court again 
touched upon that burning question in the Granger cases, whether 
action of the state affecting the use of property was to be consid- 
ered a deprivation of it, and again were constrained to deny such 
conclusions. The city had built a tunnel under the Chicago 
river, and in doing so, the Transportation Company claimed, had 
weakened the support for the walls of the latter’s buildings. It also 
claimed that by reason of a coffer-dam in the river, built to aid the 
excavation of the tunnel, access to the company’s dock had been 
impeded. 
The court finds no ground of complaint on either account ; both 
street and river are declared to be public highways and under the 
jurisdiction of the city. If, without actually invading the Trans- 
portation Company’s lots the city impaired the company’s use of 
its property, no cause of action arose. 
197 U, S.5 25. 2.99 U. S., 635 (1878). 
