his 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