470 MURDOCHS CASE.

commutative justice can be administered, it is the duty of the
court to give the party complained of an opportunity of being
heard. To restrain a defendant from making any abusive use of
the property in question; or from disposing of it past recall,
amounts to no more than the imposition of a temporary limitation
upon the free exercise of his rights, even if it should eventually
appear to be entirely and rightfully his; which is quite as far as
any court can go in the first instance; and as preparatory to a fair
and beneficial hearing and final adjudication. To order a defen-
dant to pull down or remove any erection would be obviously and
directly to deprive him of a portion of that which then, at least,
appeared to be his property, and was so claimed by him; and that
too, at once, and without a hearing; for a house, a fence, or the
like has a value, as such, which would be totally destroyed by its
being pulled down, and which does not belong to the materials of
which it was composed, however carefully they may be preserved.
The only object of the conservative power of the court, as ex-
pressed in an injunction of this kind, is, not to determine any con-
troverted right, but merely to prevent a threatened wrong, or any
further perpetration of injury, or the doing of any act thereafter
whereby the right to a thing may be embarrassed, or endangered,
or whereby its value may be materially lessened, or the thing itself
may be totally lost. The principal object of an injunction, in
cases of this kind, is to prevent irreparable injury by preserving
things in their present state; but if the injunction were to order
any thing to be pulled down or undone, it is obvious, that it might
be, itself used as a means of producing that very kind of irrepara-
ble injury to the defendant which the bill charged him with being
about to perpetrate against the plaintiff, (g)

There are, however, some cases in which an injunction has been
so framed as, apparently, to approach to the very verge of order-
ing a thing to be undone. As where the regular flowing of a
stream of water had been so interrupted by the making, or the
interposition of occasional breaches or obstructious, as to be very
injurious to the use of it for a canal, or for propelling a mill; an
injunction which commanded that the party should not thereafter
continue to cause the stream to flow thus irregularly, seemed indi-
rectly to command, and no doubt did involve the repairing of the
breaches, and the removing of the obstructions which had caused

(g) Duvall v. Waters, 1 Bland, 569.