MR. JUSTICE HOLMES delivered the opinion of the court.
This is a suit by the Brooks-Scanlon Company, a Minnesota corporation organized to manufacture and deal in lumber and to carry on other incidental business, against the Railroad Commission of Louisiana. It seeks to set aside an order (Number 2228) of the Commission requiring the plaintiff either directly or through arrangements made with the Kentwood and Eastern Railway Company, to operate its narrow gauge railroad between Kentwood and Hackley, in Louisiana, upon schedules and days to be approved by the Commission. The plaintiff alleges that the order cannot be complied with except at a loss of more than $1500 a month, and that to compel compliance would deprive the plaintiff of its property without due process of law, contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, with other objections not necessary to be mentioned here. The defendant denies the plaintiff's allegations and in reconvention prays for an injunction against the tearing up or abandoning of the road and for a mandate upholding the order. In the Court of first instance a preliminary injunction was issued in favor of the Commission, but was dissolved upon bond. Subsequently a judgment was entered denying a motion of the Commission to set aside the order dissolving the injunction, and after a trial on the merits judgment was entered for the plaintiff, declaring the order void. The defendant appealed from both judgments to the Supreme Court of the State. That Court reversed the decision below and reinstated the injunction granted on the defendant's prayer.
We are of opinion that the test applied was wrong under the decisions of this Court. A carrier cannot be compelled to carry on even a branch of business at a loss, much less the whole business of carriage. On this point it is enough to refer to Northern Pacific Ry. Co. v. North Dakota, 236 U.S. 585, 595, 599, 600, 604, and Norfolk & Western Ry. Co. v. West Virginia, 236 U.S. 605, 609, 614. It is true that if a railroad continues to exercise the power conferred upon it by a charter from a State, the State may require it to fulfil an obligation imposed by the charter even though fulfilment in that particular may cause a loss. Missouri Pacific Ry. Co. v. Kansas, 216 U.S. 262, 276, 278. But that special rule is far from throwing any doubt upon a general principle too well established to need further argument here. The plaintiff may be making money from its sawmill and lumber business but it no more can be compelled to spend that than it can be compelled to spend any other money to maintain a railroad for the benefit of others who do not care to pay for it. If the plaintiff be taken to have granted to the public an interest in the use of the railroad it may withdraw its grant by discontinuing the use when that use can be kept up only at a loss. Munn v. Illinois, 94 U.S. 113, 126. The principle is illustrated by the many cases in which the constitutionality of a rate is shown to depend upon whether it yields to the parties concerned a fair return.
While the decision below goes upon the ground that we have stated, it is thrown in at the end as a make-weight that the order of the Commission calls upon the plaintiff "to submit a new schedule for transportation which may be operated at much less expenses to it than
Finally a suggestion is made in argument that the decision rested also upon another ground that cannot be reconsidered here. At the end of the opinion it is stated that the plaintiff has not petitioned the Railroad Commission for leave to discontinue this business and that until it has done so the Courts are without jurisdiction of the matter. It is not impossible that this is an oversight since it seems unlikely that after the Commission has called the plaintiff before it on the question and against its strenuous objection has required it to go on, such an empty form can be required. But in any case it cannot be meant that the previous discussion which occupies the whole body of the opinion is superfluous and irrelevant to the result reached; nor can the words be taken literally, since the court proceeded to take jurisdiction and reinstated an injunction in favor of the defendant. Whatever may be the forms required by the local law it cannot give the Court or Commission power to do what the Constitution of the United States forbids, which is what the order and injunction attempt. Pennsylvania R.R. Co. v. Public Service Commission, 250 U.S. 566.
Decree reversed.
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