Page:Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1st ed, 1833, vol I).djvu/508

 468 and depreciating paper currency in payment of debts were generally, if not universally, prevalent. Laws authorizing the payment of debts by instalments, at periods differing entirely from the original terms of the contract; laws suspending, for a limited or uncertain period, the remedies to recover debts in the ordinary course of legal proceedings; laws authorizing the delivery of any sort of property, however unproductive or undesirable, in payment of debts upon an arbitrary or friendly appraisement; laws shutting up the courts for certain periods and under certain circumstances, were not infrequent upon the statute books of many of the states now composing the Union. In the rear of all these came the systems of general insolvent laws, some of which were of a permanent nature, and others again were adopted upon the spur of the occasion, like a sort of gaol delivery under the Lords' acts in England, which had so few guards against frauds of every kind by the debtor, that in practice they amounted to an absolute discharge from any debt, without any thing more than a nominal dividend; and sometimes even this vain mockery was dispensed with. In short, by the operations of paper currency, tender laws, installment laws, suspension laws, appraisement laws, and insolvent laws, contrived with all the dexterous ingenuity of men oppressed by debt, and popular by the very extent of private embarrassments, the states were almost universally plunged into a ruinous poverty, distrust, debility, and indifference to justice. The local tribunals were bound to obey the legislative will; and in the few instances, in which it was resisted, the independence of the judges was sacrificed to the temper