Power,
guarding itself from the responsibility of passing upon the
"reasonableness" with which that power was used. It was only by somewhat
slow degrees, as the value of the threatened property grew to be vast,
that the Court was deflected from this conservative course into
effective legislation. The first prayers for relief came from the
Southern states, who were still groaning under reconstruction
governments; but as the Southern whites were then rather poor, their
complaints were neglected. The first very famous cause of this category
is known as the Slaughter House Cases. In 1869 the Carpet Bag government
of Louisiana conceived the plan of confiscating most of the property of
the butchers who slaughtered for New Orleans, within a district about as
large as the State of Rhode Island. The Fourteenth Amendment forbade
states to deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due
process of law, and the butchers of New Orleans prayed for protection,
alleging that the manner in which their property had been taken was
utterly lawless. But the Supreme Court declined to interfere, explaining
that the Fourteenth Amendment had been contrived to protect the
emancipated slaves, and not to make the federal judiciary "a perpetual
censor upon all legislation of the states, on the civil rights of their
own citizens, with authority to nullify such as it did not approve."[26]

Although, even at that relatively early day, this conservatism met with
strong opposition within the Court itself, the pressure of vested wealth
did not gather enough momentum to overcome the inertia of the bench for
nearly another generation. It was the concentration of capital in
monopoly, and the consequent effort by the public to regulate monopoly
prices, which created the stress which changed the legal equilibrium.
The modern American monopoly seems first to have generated that amount
of friction, which habitually finds vent in a great litigation, about
the year 1870; but only some years later did the states enter upon a
determined policy of regulating monopoly prices by law, with the
establishment by the Illinois legislature of a tariff for the Chicago
elevators. The elevator companies resisted, on the ground that
regulation of prices in private business was equivalent to confiscation,
and so in 1876 the Supreme Court was dragged into this fiercest of
controversies, thereby becoming subject to a stress to which no
judiciary can safely be exposed