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 years later, in 1898. In that case it appeared that the
State of Nebraska had, in 1893, reduced freight rates within the state
about twenty-nine per cent, in order to bring them into some sort of
relation to the rates charged in the adjoining State of Iowa, which were
calculated to be forty per cent lower than the Nebraska rates. Several
of the most opulent and powerful corporations of the Union were affected
by this law, among others the exceedingly prosperous and influential
Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railway. No one pretended that, were the
law to be enforced, the total revenues of the Burlington would be
seriously impaired, nor was it even clear that, were the estimate of
reduction, revenue, and cost confined altogether to the commerce carried
on within the limits of the State of Nebraska, leaving interstate
commerce out of consideration, a loss would be suffered during the
following year.
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