ared that the prohibition against a deprivation of property "has
been in the Constitution since the adoption of the Fifth Amendment, as a
restraint upon the Federal power. It is also to be found in some form of
expression in the constitutions of nearly all the States, as a restraint
upon the power of the States. * * * We are not without judicial
interpretation, therefore, both State and National, of the meaning of
this clause. And it is sufficient to say that under no construction of
that provision that we have ever seen, or any that we deem admissible,
can the restraint imposed by the State of Louisiana upon the exercise of
their trade by the butchers of New Orleans be held to be a deprivation
of property within the meaning of that provision."[62] Four years later,
in Munn _v._ Illinois,[63] the Court again refused to interpret the due
process clause as invalidating State legislation regulating the rates
charged for the transportation and warehousing of grain. Overruling
contentions that such legislation effected an unconstitutional
deprivation of property by preventing the owner from earning a
reasonable compensation for its use and by transferring to the public an
interest in a private enterprise, Chief Justice Waite emphasized that
"the great office of statutes is to remedy defects in the common law as
they are developed, * * * We know that this power [of rate regulation]
may be abused; but that is no argument against its existence. For
protection against abuses by legislatures the people must resort to the
polls, not to the courts."[64]

Deploring such attempts, nullified consistently in the preceding cases,
to convert the due process clause into a substantive restraint on the
powers of the States, Justice Miller in Davidson _v._ New Orleans[65]
obliquely counseled against a departure from the conventional
application of the clause, albeit he acknowledged the difficulty of
arriving at a precise, all inclusive, definition thereof. "It is not a
little remarkable," he observed, "that while this provision has been in
the Constitution of the United States, as a restraint upon the authority
of the Federal Government, for nearly a century, and while, during all
that time, the manner in which the powers of that government have been
exercised has been watched with jealousy, and subjected to the most
rigid criticism in all its branches, this special limitation upon its
powers has rarely been invoked in the judicial forum or t