In Pumpelly v. Green Bay Company (1871) 80 U.S. 166, the Supreme Court construed a provision of the constitution of Wisconsin declaring that "the property of no person shall be taken for public use without just compensation therefor;" observing that it was a provision almost identical in language with the one relating to the same subject in the Federal Constitution. In that case it appeared that a public improvement in a navigable water was made under local statutory authority, whereby the plaintiff's land was permanently overflowed and its use for every purpose destroyed. Referring to some adjudged cases which went, as the court observed, beyond sound principle, it was said that, "it remains true that where real estate is actually invaded by superinduced additions of water, earth, sand or other material, or by having any artificial structure placed on it, so as to effectually destroy or impair its usefulness, it is a taking, within the meaning of the Constitution, and that this proposition is not in conflict with the weight of judicial authority in this country, and certainly not with sound principle." That case arose in Wisconsin, the constitution of which declares, like the constitutions of nearly all the States, that private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation; and this court held that the flooding of one's land by a dam constructed across a river under a law of the State was a taking within the prohibition, and required compensation to be made to the owner of the land thus flooded. In Pumpelly v. Green Bay Co., dam construction on the Fox River had caused Lake Winnebago to flood the plaintiff's property, causing "an almost complete destruction of the value of the land." The harm that plaintiff suffered was collateral to the goal of the government's action, which was to improve navigation, and there was no specific intent to appropriate the plaintiff's property. (Id. at 167-68.) The defendant argued that because the government had invaded or destroyed the plaintiff's property instead of appropriating it, there was no "taking of the land within the meaning of the constitutional provision." (Id. at 177.) Likewise, the defendant argued that the damage to the plaintiff's property was a non-compensable "consequential result" of the exercise of a recognized government power. (Id.) The premise of the defendant's argument, that the takings provision at issue only protected against the government's intentional appropriation of private property and not its invasion or destruction of that property, was roundly rejected. The court, speaking through Mr. Justice Miller, said: "It would be a very curious and unsatisfactory result, if, in construing a provision of constitutional law, always understood to have been adopted for protection and security to the rights of the individual as against the government, and which has received the commendation of jurists, statesmen, and commentators, as placing the just principles of the common law on that subject beyond the power of ordinary legislation to change or control them, it shall be held that, if the government refrains from the absolute conversion of real property to the uses of the public, it can destroy its value entirely, can inflict irreparable and permanent injury to any extent, can, in effect, subject it to total destruction without making any compensation, because, in the narrowest sense of the word, it is not taken for the public use. Such a construction would pervert the constitutional provision into a restriction on the rights of the citizen, as those rights stood at the common law, instead of the government, and make it an authority for invasion of private right under the pretext of the public good, which had no warrant in the laws or practices of our ancestors."