Page:Earle, Does Price Fixing Destroy Liberty, 1920, 174.jpg

174 without an application of the unmitigated terror established in the French Revolution, that so completely annihilated every principle of constitutional right.

3rd. That the "just compensation" of the Constitution consists simply "of full and perfect equivalency of value," the meaning of that "value" must be definitely determined before "just compensation" can be properly understood and applied; and that that determination has, happily, been attained in a series of unvarying decisions of the Supreme Court, that absolutely settle the matters now under discussion in favor of the principles necessary to protect our Constitutional Liberty.

4th. That the "value" of ordinary commodities can only be determined by the results of free competition, in a free government, conducted by free men. "Value," being not at all the result of any one citizen's view, desire or decree, but is that of all men, acting in a free market in free competition, in untrammeled freedom; and it is, therefore, always a matter of ascertainable fact; never of mere guess or surmise; it is a fact of the existing world; of existing conditions; never of imaginary worlds or conditions, or imaginary ideas. It is always the result, like contract, of a meeting,—an agreement of minds; not the view of one, unaccepted by another, but a result regulated solely by "the relative intensity of the desires of the whole community." "Value" deals only with the actual, never with imaginary conditions other than the facts. Its ascertainment is not to be compelled by peril of indictment and through guesses as to what the community would have given, but only by what it actually does give. Its ultimate determination always finally rests upon what men are willing to give for a commodity, rather than incur the exertion necessary to create it for themselves. Value, therefore, can no more be defined, or known than a contract can, until an actual and accomplished meeting