if effectual, deprive the former of his property without due process of law. * * * Such an enactment would not receive judicial sanction in any country having a written Constitution distributing the powers of Government among three co-ordinate departments, and committing to the judiciary, expressly or by implication, authority to enforce the provisions of such Constitution. It would be treated not as an act of legislative power, but as a sentence, an act of spoliation. Due protection of the rights of property has been regarded as a vital principle of Republican institutions. 'Next in degree to the right of personal liberty * * * is the right of enjoying private property without undue interference or molestation.' The requirement that the property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation is but 'an affirmance of a great doctrine established by the Common Law for the protection of private property. It is founded in natural equity, and is laid down by jurists as a principle of universal law. Indeed, in a free Government, all other rights would become worthless if the Government possessed an uncontrolled power over the private fortune of every citizen.' "
Another very valuable opinion in this connection is that of Mr. Justice Miller, in the case of Loan Assn. vs. Topeka,[1] and, quite recently in Smith vs. Texas,[2] it is said: "Life, liberty, property, and the equal protection of the law, grouped together in the Constitution, are so related that the deprivation of any one of these separate and independent rights may lessen or extinguish the value of the other three. In so far
