Page:North Dakota Reports (vol. 2).pdf/525

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NORTH DAKOTA EX REL. STOESER v. BRASS.
499

cases decided in state and federal courts upholding the doctrine of legislative control over elevators and warehouses as a proper exercise of the internal police power inherent in every government, reaches the conclusion, and so decides, that the conviction of Budd and the defendants in the other cases must be sustained. This decision reaffirms and accentuates the broad doctrine of the right of state legislative control over warenouses and elevators which was announced October, 1876, sixteen years before, by the same court in Munn v. Illinois, 94 U. S. 113. After referring at length to the opinion of the learned court of appeals (People v. Budd, 117 N. Y. 1, 22 N. E. Rep. 670, 682), which seemed to cover every phase of the question, the federal supreme court declares: “We regard these views which we have referred to as announced by the court of appeals of New York, so far as they support the validity of the statute in question, as sound and just.” Proceeding, the court say: “This court in Munn v. Illinois, the opinion being delivered by Chief Justice Warr, there being a published dissent by two justices, considered carefully the question of the repugnancy of the Illinois statute to the fourteenth amendment. It said that, under the powers of government inherent in every sovereignty, the government regulates the conduct of its citizens one towards another, and the manner in which each shall use his own property, when such regulations become necessary for the public good, and that in their exercise it has been customary in England from time immemorial, and in this country from its first colonization, to regulate ferries, common carriers, hackmen, bakers, millers, wharfingers, innkeepers, etc., and in so doing to fix a maximum of charge to be made for services rendered, accommodations furnished, and articles sold. It was added, ‘To this day statutes are to be found in many of the states upon some or all of these subjects;’ and we think it has never yet been successfully contended that such legislation came within any of the constitutional prohibitions against interference with private property. It announced as its conclusion that, down to the time of the adoption of the fourteenth amendment, it was not supposed that statutes regulating the use, or even the price of the use, of private property necessarily deprived an owner of his property