ury, the elective and other political franchises, liberty of
conscience, of speech and of the press, are able to protect themselves
in a great measure from their own democratic affinities. It is true,
that there really is no difference between wresting from a man the few
dollars, the products or savings of his industry for any period of time,
and depriving him of his liberty, or chaining him to a log, to work for
another during the same period. Property eminently stands in need of
every parchment barrier, which has been or can be thrown around it. An
eminent Judge in our own State once threw out the opinion that there
existed in the Constitution no disaffirmance of the power of the
legislature to take the property of an individual for _private uses_
with or without compensation. "The clause," he argued, "by which it is
declared that no man's property shall be taken or applied to _public_
use, without compensation made, is a disabling, not an enabling one, and
the right would have existed in full force without it." (Harvey _v._
Thomas, 10 Watts, 63.) Fortunately, the decision of the court in that
case did not require a resort to that reasoning, and but little
examination was sufficient to satisfy the mind that this _obiter dictum_
was unsustained by either principle or authority. A power in the
legislature to take the property of A. and give it to B. directly, would
be of the very essence of despotism. When it is declared in the Bill of
Rights that no man shall be deprived of his life, liberty, or property,
unless by the judgment of his peers, or the law of the land, this
phrase, "law of the land," does not mean merely an act of the
legislature. If it did, every restriction upon the legislative
department would be practically abrogated. By an authority as old as
Lord Coke, in commenting upon these same words in _Magna Charta_, they
are to be rendered "without due process of law: that is, by indictment
or presentment of good and lawful men, when such deeds be done in due
manner, or by writ original of the common law, without being brought
into answer but by due process of the common law." (2 Inst. 50.) The
American laws are numerous and uniform to the point (see 1 American Law
Mag. 315); and the same eminent Judge, to whom reference has been made
in a later case, declared his adhesion to the sound and true doctrine in
the most emphatic language, without noticing his own previous _dictum_
to the contrary. "It was deemed nece