Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 1.djvu/98

  priority over other creditors; and, therefore, that a law could not be held void which provided that where any revenue officer, or other person, should hereafter become indebted to the United States, and then insolvent, the debt due to the United States should be satisfied first, without limiting this postponement of private creditors to the case of such as should become creditors after the passage of the law. Mr. Justice Washington described this law, if interpreted as the Court did interpret and sustain it, as “productive of the most cruel injustice to individuals,” and tending “to destroy, more than any other act I can imagine, all confidence between man and man.” He himself found it possible to interpret the law as applying only to persons accountable to the government, and so as not applicable to this case; and he therefore dissented from the opinion of the Court. But he admitted the power of Congress to go further if it saw fit: “The sovereign may in the exercise of his powers secure to himself this exclusive privilege of being preferred to the citizens; but this is no evidence that the claim is sanctioned by the claims of immutable justice. If the right is asserted individuals must submit,” etc. And the Court (Marshall, C. J.), interpreting it to cover all debts, said: “The power is not prohibited. But it is said, and it is true, it must appear to be granted. It is so under the power to make all laws necessary and proper to carry into execution the powers vested. It need not be indispensable; Congress may use any means which are, in fact, conducive to the exercise of any powers granted by the Constitution. It has the power to pay the debts of the Union, and it must be authorized to use the means which appear to itself most eligible to effect that object.”

But, again, apart from the phrases of the preamble of the Constitution, it is said that the spirit of the Constitution as regards contracts is shown by the contemporaneous provisions which were made by the Congress of the Confederation sitting at the time of the convention, in framing the ordinance for the North-western Territory, viz., that no law should be passed there which interfered with private contracts, and also by the provisions of the Constitution prohibiting States from impairing the obligations of contracts. And so the Court (Chase, C. J.) says: “A law not made in