whether manifested as the decree of a personal monarch or of an
impersonal multitude. And the limitations imposed by our constitutional
law upon the action of the governments, both State and national, are
essential to the preservation of public and private rights,
notwithstanding the representative character of our political
institutions. The enforcement of these limitations by judicial process
is the device of self-governing communities to protect the rights of
individuals and minorities, as well against the power of numbers, as
against the violence of public agents transcending the limits of lawful
authority, even when acting in the name and wielding the force of the
government."[68] Thus were the States put on notice that every species
of State legislation, whether dealing with procedural or substantive
rights, was subject to the scrutiny of the Court when the question of
its essential justice is raised.

Police Power: Liberty: Property

What induced the Court to dismiss its fears of upsetting the balance in
the distribution of powers under the Federal System and to enlarge its
own supervisory powers over state legislation were the appeals more and
more addressed to it for adequate protection of property rights against
the remedial social legislation which the States were increasingly
enacting in the wake of industrial expansion. At the same time the added
emphasis on the due process clause which satisfaction of these requests
entailed afforded the Court an opportunity to compensate for its earlier
virtual nullification of the privileges and immunities clause of the
amendment. So far as such modification of its position needed to be
justified in legal terms, theories concerning the relation of government
to private rights were available to demonstrate the impropriety of
leaving to the state legislatures the same ample range of police power
they had enjoyed prior to the Civil War. Preliminary, however, to this
consummation the Slaughter-House Cases and Munn _v._ Illinois had to be
overruled in part, at least, and the views of the dissenting Justices in
those cases converted into majority doctrine.

About twenty years were required to complete this process, in the course
of which the restricted view of the police power advanced by Justice
Field in his dissent in Munn _v._ Illinois,[69] namely, that it is
solely a power to prevent injury, was in effect ratified by the Court
itself. This occurred in 1887, in Mugler