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, 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