vident
grant of the public petitionary without recourse to the power of eminent
domain, such a grant being inherently beyond the power of the State to
make. So when the legislature of Illinois in 1869 devised to the
Illinois Central Railroad Company, its successors and assigns, the
State's right and title to nearly a thousand acres of submerged land
under Lake Michigan along the harbor front of Chicago, and four years
later sought to repeal the grant, the Court, in a four-to-three
decision, sustained an action by the State to recover the lands in
question. Said Justice Field, speaking for the majority: "Such
abdication is not consistent with the exercise of that trust which
requires the government of the State to preserve such waters for the use
of public. The trust devolving upon the State for the public, and which
can only be discharged by the management and control of property in
which the public has an interest, cannot be relinquished by a transfer
of the property. * * * Any grant of the kind is necessarily revocable,
and the exercise of the trust by which the property was held by the
State can be resumed at any time."[1683] The case affords an interesting
commentary on Fletcher _v._ Peck.[1684]

The Taxing Power Not Inalienable.--On the other hand, repeated
endeavors to subject tax exemptions to the doctrine of inalienability
though at times supported by powerful minorities on the Bench, have
always failed.[1685] As recently as January, 1952, the Court ruled that
the Georgia Railway Company was entitled to seek an injunction in the
federal courts against an attempt by Georgia's Revenue Commission to
compel it to pay _ad valorem_ taxes contrary to the terms of its special
charter issued in 1833. To the argument that this was a suit contrary to
the Eleventh Amendment it returned the answer that the immunity from
Federal jurisdiction created by the Amendment "does not extend to
individuals who act as officers without constitutional authority."[1686]

The Police Power; When Inalienable.--The leading case involving
the police power is Stone _v._ Mississippi, 101 U.S. 814, decided in
1880. In 1867 the legislature of Mississippi chartered a company to
which it expressly granted the power to conduct a lottery. Two years
later the State adopted a new Constitution which contained a provision
forbidding lotteries; and a year later the legislature passed an act to
put this provision into effect. In upholding this act and the