Page:Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1st ed, 1833, vol III).djvu/247

 CH. XXXIII.]. The power to pass such laws would still remain, at least so far as respects crimes committed without the state. During the revolutionary war, bills of attainder, and ex post facto acts of confiscation, were passed to a wide extent; and the evils resulting therefrom were supposed, in times of more cool reflection, to have far outweighed any imagined good.