Our study of this subject, therefore, will be confined to the restrictive or limiting legislation affecting private property or property rights, and of this we shall find plenty.  Now there are four, and only four, methods by which the state, that is to say, American society as organized into governments, interferes with the right to property or the enjoyment and use thereof; that is to say, taxation, which is, of course, general; eminent domain, a peculiarly American doctrine; the police power; and the regulation of rates and charges.  Some authorities place the last under the police power; but It does not seem to me that it historically, if logically, belongs there.

Starting with the simplest first—­eminent domain, an American doctrine which, in its simplest form, subjects the land of any one to the need of the state or, in cases authorized by the Federal Constitution, of the nation.  It is questionable whether it applies to personal property.  It is an American doctrine, for in England where the king remained in theory the feudal over-lord, it was not necessary for him or the sovereign Parliament, wishing to take or control land, and having no constitution protecting property rights against such action, to invent any new doctrine; but with us all land is allodial.  The old charters of the original States creating tenures in free and common socage are, of course, obsolete.  Everybody is a freeholder, and the States are not, still less the Federal government, a feudal over-lord.  Nevertheless, the property of every one must be subject to the supreme common necessity; and the right is absolute in the States, although limited in the national government by the Federal Constitution.  It is an American constitutional principle; and this principle also provides, as does Magna Charta and the early charters of England as to personal property seized by royal purveyors, that full damages must be paid; and to this general principle our constitutions have added that the damages must be paid at the time of the taking and the amount be determined by due process of law; that is to say, in most cases by a jury.  Blackstone says:  “So great is the regard of the law for private property that it will not authorize the least violation of it; no, not even for the general good of the whole community";[1] a new road, for instance, cannot be made without consent of the owner of the land, and the words “eminent domain” do not appear in the text of his book.  But though we hold the contrary doctrine, the rights of the property owner are sufficiently protected when the taking is directed by the State, or even by a city or town.  The menace to property here, with the increasing bulk of legislation, comes in the number of new uses, not only directly for the State or for cities and towns, but for public-service corporations, or often other private corporations, and associations of persons, who are permitted by legislation to take land under eminent domain, or, what is often worse,