to acquire easements over it.  Most of the States give damages for land not actually taken, but damaged, though our Federal courts have not held this to be necessary under the Fourteenth Amendment; but although land can still, in theory, only be taken for a public use, the number of uses which our legislation makes public Is being enormously increased.  The usual national purposes are forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings.  Independent of some express permission in the Constitution, the Federal government has no power to take, or even to own, land at all within the State limits.  Therefore, it is questioned whether land may be taken for national parks or forest reservations except in the Territories, where title still remains with the Federal government.  But the State’s power of eminent domain is unlimited, although it began only with the towns or counties taking roads for highways, and cities and towns appropriating lands for schools and other public buildings.  Probably the only serious addition of a wholly public use is covered by the general expression, parks and playgrounds; but the analogy of the highway led to the taking of land under eminent domain for railroads, when they were first invented, then for street railways, then for telegraph, telephone, and electric-light lines, underground pipe-lines or conduits of all sorts, and finally, for drains, sewerage districts, public, and often private irrigation purposes.  Most of the more complex State constitutions define at great length to the extent of some twenty or thirty paragraphs just what purposes shall be considered a public use under eminent domain.  In the absence of such definition, or without such definition, the number of such uses is being enormously increased by statute.  Thus, reservoirs, storage basins, irrigation canals, ditches, flumes, and pipes for water drainage, or mining purposes, working mines, as dumps, hoists, shafts, tunnels, are made a public use by the constitutions of the arid States, Idaho and Wyoming.  So as to water only in Montana, but in Idaho also to any other use “necessary for the complete development of the material resources of the State or the preservation of the health of its inhabitants."[2] And even by private parties, land may be taken for ways of necessity in many States, and for drains, flumes, and aqueducts by the constitutions of the arid States.

[Footnote 1:  Book I, p. 139.]

[Footnote 2:  These provisions are collated in “Federal and State Constitutions,” p. 159.]

At common law, of course, a man or a set of men, who happen to be neighbors, would have had no right to take my land for a private way, or for drainage or irrigation purposes, however beneficial to their land; still less to take water from my stream across my land to their fields.  But this precise thing can be done in an increasing number of States, although it has been held unconstitutional in the courts of one or two of the far Western States, and has even yet