Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 8.djvu/424

408 408 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. authorized by the same Act, the Senate and House, by reserva- tion, can create and acquire the non-legislative power of altering all agreements. " All future contracts, not made under and in accordance with this Act, are prohibited. The power of making a contract under this Act is granted to those only who accept and exercise the granted power with and upon the condition that the contract may be amended by a power hereby reserved and hereby vested in the legislature. This Act shall be a part of every contract; and every stipulation excluding it, and every device for evading it shall be illegal and void. All law inconsistent with this Act is hereby repealed." Such an Act in amendment of the law of contracts would assume, not that partnership and all other private contracts are laws of the land, makable and alterable only by law-makers, but that they are not laws, and can be made and altered by persons who are not legislators, and that the non-legis- lative power of altering them can be reserved by the Senate and House, and added to the law-making power of those assemblies. The power thus reserved would be appropriately exercised by such acts as these: " A's written agreement to pay B ;^io, ten months after date, without security (or with such security only as a court can give by preventing the debtor's diversion of his property from the payment of the debt before it is due, when the threatened and wrongful diversion is found upon a judicial trial), is hereby amended: the debtor shall give security by paying $i z. month to the trustee of a sinking fund of which the creditor is hereby ap- pointed trustee; but if the debtor chooses to avoid the risks of the sinking trust, he may pay ^i a month to the creditor as cred- itor." " B's indebtedness to A, secured by mortgage, is hereby amended : the mortgage is discharged." " C's agreement to pay D ^lo is hereby amended: the debtor shall pay j^ioo." "The partnership agreement of E, F and G to run a daily coach between Concord and Lebanon is hereby amended : a majority of them may assign all the partnership business to H by a lease of all the part- nership property for ninety-nine years." Each of these amend- ments would be enacted to overcome an objection made by one of the contracting parties to an alteration of his agreement. The amendments would not be valid unless they were law. If they would be law, they could not be made by the contracting parties, and the original contracts and all other agreements not made by law-makers would be void. In the supposed case of A's unsecured indebtedness, a legisla-