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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.
to make them public. The sphere for disagreement has, however, within recent years greatly narrowed. One of the most clear and comprehensive of illustrations on this topic, given by the Supreme Court of Michigan (People vs. Township, 20 Michigan, 452), through Justice Thomas M. Cooley, was as follows:
In respect to "certain things of absolute necessity to civilized society," the State is precluded either by express constitutional provisions or by necessary implications, from providing for at all, and which are thus left wholly to the fostering care of private enterprise and private liberality. We concede, for instance, that religion is essential, and that without it we should degenerate to barbarism and brutality; yet we prohibit the State from burdening the citizen with its support, and we content ourselves with recognizing and protecting its observance on similar grounds. Certain professions and occupations in life are also essential, but we have no authority to employ the public money to induce persons to enter them. The necessity may be pressing and to supply it may be in a certain sense to accomplish a public purpose, but it is not a purpose for which the power of taxation may be employed. The public necessity for an educated, skillful physician in some particular locality may be great and pressing, yet, if the people should be taxed to hire one to locate there, the common voice would exclaim that the public moneys were being devoted to a private purpose. The opening of a new street in a city or village may be of trifling importance as compared with the location within it of some new business or manufacture; but while the right to pay out the public funds for the one would be unquestionable, the other by common consent is classified as a private interest which the public can aid as individuals, if they see fit, while they are not permitted to employ the machinery of government to that end. Indeed, the opening of a new street in the outskirts of a city is generally very much more a matter of private interest than of public concern; yet, even in a case where the public authorities did not regard the street as of sufficient importance to induce their taking the necessary action to secure it, it would not be doubted that the moment they should consent to so accept it as a gift, the street would at once become a public object and purpose upon which the public funds might be expended with no more restraints upon the action of the authorities in that particular than if it were the most prominent and essential thoroughfare in the city.
By common consent, also, a large portion of the most urgent needs of society are relegated exclusively to the law of demand and supply. It is this in its natural operation and without the interference of the Government that gives us the proper proportion to tillers of the soil, artisans, manufacturers, merchants, and professional men, and that determines when and where they shall give to society the benefit of their particular services. However great the need in the direction of any particular calling, the interference of Government is not tolerated, because, though it might be sup plying a public want, it is considered as invading the domain that belongs exclusively to private inclination and enterprise. We perceive, therefore, that the term "public purpose," as employed to denote the objects for which taxes may be levied, has no relation to the urgency of the public need or to the extent of the public benefit which is to follow. It is, on the other hand, merely a term of classification to distinguish the objects for which,
