OWNERSHIP BY FOREIGN CORPORATIONS. 93 that public policy defined to be the principle of law which holds that no subject or citizen can lawfully do that which is injurious to the public or against the public good,-^ — a principle, the application of which has not infrequently led to judicial legislation, and which, it has been said, *' is never argued at all but when other points fail." Apply this rule to the subject in hand, and the result will depend upon what, as a matter of sound policy, a given court thinks the law ought to be, and not upon what the law actually is.^ Instances are not wanting in which courts have inclined to believe they might properly do this. For example, Mr. Justice Christiancy, of the Supreme Court of Michigan,^ enumerates certain consequences which he thought might result from permitting foreign corpo- rations to acquire real property in that State : —
- I. The danger of their becoming speculators in lands to large
amounts, keeping them unimproved, or introducing a system of tenancies in which the tenants would be in a great measure de- pendent upon such corporation. " 2. The holding of such lands for a long period of time, as they pass by perpetual succession without any change or break by death, as in the case of natural persons.
- 3. The influence which wealthy corporations holding large
bodies of land in the State might exercise upon the legislature." 1 Lord Brougham in the Bridgewater Will Case, 4 H. L. Cases, i. 2 Two amusing instances of the extent to which judges have permitted their views of what is contrary to public policy, or the public good, to influence their judgment, may be cited. In King v. Waddington, i East, 143, the defendant was sentenced to fine and imprisonment for contracting for one fifth of the hop product of two counties, as a specu- lation, with the view to raise the price by telling sellers that hops were too cheap, and planters that the price was too low. It v/as held that this was against public policy, and Grose, J., in delivering the opinion of the court, said : " It would be a precedent of most awful moment for this court to declare that hops, which are an article of merchandise, and which we are compelled to use for the preservation of the common beverage of the people of this country, are not an article the price of which it is a Crime by undue means to enhance." In Locke's Appeal, 72 Penn. 491, the court, by a majority opinion, sustained the constitutionality of a local option liquor law. Mr. Justice Read, in the course of a dis- senting opinion, expressed himself as follows : " The question of license or no license is to be submitted to the citizens of Philadelphia at the general election in October, and if the vote is against license, then the city will be under a prohibitory liquor law during the whole Centennial celebration to which we have invited the whole country. On the 4th July, 1 776, every patriot drank to the independence of the thirteen States ; shall it be that on the 4th July, 1876, all we can lawfully offer to our guests on this great anniversary will be a glass of Schuylkill water, seasoned with a lump of Knickerbocker ice ? I believe in moral suasion as the true means of advancing the temperance cause ; but I do not believe in a prohibitory law which would reduce us to the condition of Boston."
- Thompson v. Waters, 25 Mich. 214.
