Whatever may be thought of the economic wisdom of attempting to regulate any rate or prices by law (and for a discussion of this subject as to railways, at least, the reader may well be referred to the valuable treatise of Mr. Hugo R. Meyer, “State Regulation of Railways"), such legislation was at least in England constitutional; but in this country, owing to our specific adoption of the principle of property rights and freedom of labor and hence of freedom of contract in our Federal and State constitutions, and as it has been repeatedly decided that to take away the income from property or a reasonable return for labor by legislation is to infringe on the property or liberty right itself, we have a universally recognized constitutional objection which has, in fact, made impossible all regulation of prices and wages, except as above mentioned, and as we are now about to discuss.  The first attempt to regulate rates (with the possible exception of some early colonial laws) was the so-called Granger legislation, as shown in the Illinois Constitution of 1870, authorizing a warehouse commission to fix charges for elevating grain, the Act of Iowa of 1874 establishing reasonable maximum rates for railways, a similar act in Wisconsin of the same year relating to railroad, express, and telegraph companies, and in Minnesota; which legislation was all sustained by a divided opinion in the so-called Granger cases headed by Munn v. Illinois, 94 U.S. 113.

In the many years which have elapsed since this famous decision, the clouds have rolled away and the shape and basis of that apex of our jurisprudence been fairly surveyed.  It will appear, I think, to any dispassionate jurist to have been rightly decided, at least as to the railroads, though the reasons given by Chief Justice Waite are unsatisfactory and have little logical basis.  The true basis of regulation of rates at the common law and in English history was monopoly; either a franchise directly granted by the crown, such as a bridge, ferry, or dock, or one which was geographically, at least, exclusive, like a dock without a franchise.  As Lord Ellenborough said in the decision quoted by the Chief Justice himself:  “Every man may fix what price he pleases upon his own property, or the use of it; but if for a particular purpose the public have a right to resort to his premises and make use of them, and he have a monopoly in them for that purpose, if he will take the benefit of that monopoly, he must, as an equivalent, perform the duty attached to it on reasonable terms.” “If for a particular purpose the public have a right to resort to his premises”—­this important qualification from now on seems to have been lost sight of in the majority opinion.  Quoting the early precedents such as that statute of William and Mary regulating the charges of common carriers—­and our readers will remember many more—­and the case of cabmen whose charges are regulated by city ordinances—­but they are given stands or