legitimacy of a property interest can be reduced to a purely moral issue.
Usually there are also at stake, technical and broad economic issues in
which majority judgment is notoriously fallible. Thus we have at times had
large minorities who believed that the bank as an institution is wholly
evil, and ought to be abolished. This was the majority opinion in one
period of the history of Texas, and in accordance with it, established
banking interests were destroyed by law. It is only within the last
fifteen years that the majority of the citizens of that commonwealth have
admitted the error of the earlier view.

In the course of the last twenty-five years, notable progress has been
made in the art of preserving perishable foods through refrigeration.
There are differences of opinion as to the effect upon the public health
of food so preserved; and further differences as to the effect of the cold
storage system upon the cost of living. On neither the physiological nor
the economic questions involved is majority opinion worthy of special
consideration. None the less, legislative measures directed against the
storage interests have been seriously considered in a large number of
states, and were it not for the difficulties inherent in the regulation of
interstate commerce, we should doubtless see the practice of cold storage
prohibited in some jurisdictions. Those whose property would thus be
destroyed would accept their losses with much bitterness, in view of the
fact that the weight of expert opinion holds their industry to be in the
public interest.

What still further exacerbates the feeling of injury on the part of those
whose interests are proscribed, is the fact that the purity of motives of
the persons most active in the campaign of proscription is not always
clear. Not many years ago we had a thriving manufacture of artificial
butter. The persons engaged in the industry claimed that their product was