f Assistance, presaged the
American Revolution; and the Dred Scott decision was the prelude to the
Civil War.

The capital essential of justice is that, under like conditions, all
should fare alike. The magistrate should be no respecter of persons. The
vice of our system of judicial dispensation is that it discriminates
among suitors in proportion to their power of resistance. This is so
because, under adequate pressure, our courts yield along the path of
least resistance. I should not suppose that any man could calmly turn
over the pages of the recent volumes of the reports of the Supreme Court
of the United States and not rise from the perusal convinced that the
rich and the poor, the strong and the weak, do not receive a common
measure of justice before that judgment seat. Disregarding the
discrimination which is always apparent against those who are unpopular,
or who suffer under special opprobrium, as do liquor dealers, owners of
lotteries, and the like,[30] I will take, nearly at random, a couple of
examples of rate regulation, where tenderness has been shown property in
something approaching to a mathematical ratio to the amount involved.

In April, 1894, a record was produced before the Supreme Court which
showed that the State of North Dakota had in 1891 established rates for
elevating and storing grain, which rates the defendant, named Brass, who
owned a small elevator, alleged to be, to him in particular, _utterly_
ruinous, and to be in general unreasonable. He averred that he used his
elevator for the storage of his own grain, that it cost about $3000,
that he had no monopoly, as there were many hundred such elevators in
the state, and, as land fit for the purpose of building elevators was
plenty and cheap, that any man could build an elevator in the town in
which he lived, as well as he; that the rates he charged were
reasonable, and that, were he compelled to receive grain generally at
the rates fixed by the statute, he could not store his own grain. All
these facts were admitted by demurrer, and Brass contended that if any
man's property were ever to be held to be appropriated by the public
without compensation, and under no form of law at all save a predatory
statute, it should be his; but the Supreme Court voted the Dakota
statute to be a reasonable exercise of the Police Power,[31] and
dismissed Brass to his fate.

The converse case is a very famous one known as Smyth _v._ Ames,[32]
decided four yea