The doctrine of presumed dedication of private property to public use, in its application to railroads - Softcover

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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1881 edition. Excerpt: ... PRIVATE PROPERTY TO PUBLIC USE. 13 proceeding. You are impatient enough to ask one more question: When, where, and how was that public compact made subject to the exception that the nature of the employment shall determine that the property is not under the protection of the compact? To this question no man can give you an answer. The prohibition of the Fourteenth Amendment is subject to no exception whatever. Your presumed consent cannot reach it. We do not hold our lives, our liberty, or our property, by any tenure which will authorize the legislative power to take away either of them by assuming our consent, as a presumption of law or of fact, arising out of the mode in which we have used either of them. When we are deprived of life, liberty, or property, by judicial process, our consent has nothing to do with the matter. Society, when it acts judicially, acts without regard to our consent, against our will, and in spite of it. The legislative power alone can never deprive us of life or liberty, either with or without our consent; and it can never deprive us of property against our will, without making or securing just compensation. Let us follow this a little farther: Does any one suppose that any legislature in this Union could now make a slave, by taking a man's express, or acting on his presumed, consent to be a slave? Or that a State can, by legislative decree, put a man to death upon his consent to be hung, without a judicial trial. Would the executioner be any the less guilty of murder than are those who execute the decrees of Judge Lynch? I cannot understand how a man's presumed consent to be deprived of his property without "due process of law" has any more force than his consent to be deprived of life or liberty in the same manner....

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