_v._ Kansas,[70] where the
power was defined as embracing no more than the power to promote public
health, morals, and safety. During the same interval, ideas embodying
the social compact and natural rights, which had been espoused by
Justice Bradley in his dissent in the Slaughter-House Cases,[71] had
been transformed tentatively into constitutionally enforceable
limitations upon government,[72] with the consequence that the States,
in exercising their police power, could foster only those purposes of
health, morals, and safety which the Court had enumerated and could
employ only such means as would not unreasonably interfere with the
fundamental natural rights of liberty and property, which Justice
Bradley had equated with freedom to pursue a lawful calling and to make
contracts for that purpose.[73]

So having narrowed the scope of the State's police power in deference to
the natural rights of liberty and property, the Court next proceeded to
read into the latter currently accepted theories of _laissez faire_
economics, reinforced by the doctrine of evolution as elaborated by
Herbert Spencer, to the end that "liberty", in particular, became
synonymous with governmental hands-off in the field of private economic
relations. In Budd _v._ New York,[74] decided in 1892, Justice Brewer in
a dictum declared: "The paternal theory of government is to me odious.
The utmost possible liberty to the individual, and the fullest possible
protection to him and his property, is both the limitation and duty of
government." And to implement this point of view the Court next
undertook to water down the accepted maxim that a State statute must be
presumed to be valid until clearly shown to be otherwise.[75] The first
step was taken with the opposite intention. This occurred in Munn _v._
Illinois,[76] where the Court, in sustaining the legislation before it,
declared: "For our purposes we must assume that, if a state of facts
could exist that would justify such legislation, it actually did exist
when the statute now under consideration was passed."[77] Ten years
later, in Mugler _v._ Kansas[78] this procedure was improved upon, and a
State-wide anti-liquor law was sustained on the basis of the proposition
that deleterious social effects of the excessive use of alcoholic
liquors were sufficiently notorious for the Court to be able to take
notice of them; that is to say, for the Court to review and appraise
the considerations which had indu