Page:North Dakota Reports (vol. 2).pdf/529

quate that its practical effect would be to deprive the warehouseman of his property without due process of law, or so inadequate as to be non-compensatory in amount. In its recent opinion above cited the supreme court of the United States quoted at length, and with marked approval, the clear and emphatic language employed by the court of appeals of the state of New York in People v. Budd, wherein that learned court repeatedly gave its sanction to the governmental power upon which the warehouse laws of Illinois and New York are based, and upon which such laws can alone be sustained as constitutional laws, viz., the internal police power. While the courts cautiously avoid all attempts to circumscribe this all-pervasive power by definitions descriptive of its entire scope and utmost boundaries, it is also true that the courts of this country recognize the existence of such power as a fact, and as an essential element in all orderly government. In a case properly within the police power of the state, the exercise of that power by the legislature is as vitally important and as essentially constitutional as the exercise of any other governmental power whatsoever. The supreme court of the United States, referring to the views of the court of appeals, say: “The court of appeals said that, in view of the foregoing exceptional circumstances, the business of elevating grain was affected with a public interest, within the language of Lord Chief Justice Hatz in his treatise De Partibus Maris (Harg. Law Tracts, 78); that the case fell within the principle which permitted the legislature to regulate the business of common carriers, ferrymen, hackmen, and interest on the use of money; that the underlying principle was that business of certain kinds hold such a peculiar relation to the public interests that there is superinduced upon it the right of public regulation; and that the court rested the power of the legislature to control and regulate elevator charges upon the nature and extent of the business—the existence of a virtual monopoly, the benefit derived from the Erie canal's creating the business and making it possible, the interest to trade and commerce, the relation of the business to the property and welfare of the state, and the practice of legislation in analogous cases, collectively, creating an exceptional case, and justifying legislative regulation.”