Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 9.djvu/553

525 INJUNCTIONS AGAINST LIQUOR NUISANCES. 525 unauthorized, and therefore a nuisance, should not be enjoined, as the injury resulting to the pubhc would be but slight. Upon this question of fact Lord Justice Knight Bruce dissented, and the cor- rectness of the decision on this point may perhaps be questioned. Lord Justice Turner's statement of the principle underlying the jurisdiction of the court in such cases is, however, important. He says, at page 320: — " I confess, Iiowever, that, looking at the principles on which as I ap- prehend this court interferes, it does not appear to ine that there can be any sound distinction between cases of private and public nuisance. It is not on the ground of any criminal offence committed^ or for the pur- pose of giving a better remedy in the case of a criminal offence, that this court is or can be called on to interfere. It is on the ground of injury to property that the jurisdiction of this court must rest ; and taking it to rest upon that ground, the only distinction which seems to me to exist between cases of public and private nuisance is this, that in cases of private nuisance the injury is to individual property, and in cases of public nuisance the injury is to the property of mankind." ^ The decision was followed in 1868 by the Court of Appeal in Attorney General v. Cambridge Consumers' Gas Co. ,2 where Lord Justice Selwyn, referring to the position of the Attorney General, said, at page 86 : — " He sues, as representing the public, by an original independent title, namely, as protector of the rights of the public against a nuisance to the public highway." It seems then to be sufficiently evident that in the cases of public nuisances there is no exception to the general rule that equity has jurisdiction only in civil cases, and that its injunctions will issue only to prevent or remedy injuries of a civil nature to property. The general rule was much discussed and authoritatively stated in 1861, in the interesting and important case of Emperor of Austria V. Day.^ There an injunction restraining the defendant Day from making notes purporting to be notes of the Hungarian state, or from delivering them to the defendant Kossuth, who intended to use them in Hungary, was sustained, on the ground that the plain- tiff, as King of Hungary and representing the Hungarian people, 1 Compare Saltau v. De Held, 2 Sim. n. s. 133, 154; Kavanagh v. Barber, 131 N. Y. 211. » 3 DeG. F. & J. 217. 69
 * L. R. 4 Ch. App. 71, reversing s. c, L. R. 6 Eq. 282.