This same trick has been employed to justify insolvent and bankrupt laws, so-called, whereby a first creditor's right to a first mortgage on the property of his debtor, has been taken from him, and he has been compelled to take his chances with as many subsequent creditors as the debtor may succeed in becoming indebted to All these absurdities and atrocities have been practiced by the lawmakers of the States, and sustained by the courts, under the pretence that they (the courts) did not know what the natural "obligation of contracts" was; or that, if they did know what it was, the constitution of the United States imposed no restraint upon its unlimited violation by the State lawmakers. SECTION XX. But, not content with having always sanctioned the unlimited power of the _State_ lawmakers to abolish all men's natural right to make their own contracts, the Supreme Court of the United States has, within the last twenty years, taken pains to assert that congress also has the arbitrary power to abolish the same right. 1. It has asserted the arbitrary power of congress to abolish all men's right to make their own contracts, by asserting its power _to alter the meaning of all contracts, after they are made_, so as to make them widely, or wholly, different from what the parties had made them. Thus the court has said that, after a man has made a contract to pay a certain number of dollars, at a future time,--_meaning such dollars as were current at the time the contract was made_,--congress has power to coin a dollar of less value than the one agreed on, and authorize the debtor to pay his debt with a dollar of less value than the one he had promised. To cover up this infamous crime, the court asserts, over and over again,--what no one denies,--that congress has power (constitutionally speaking) to alter, at pleasure, the value of its coins. But it then asserts that congress has this additional, and wholly different, power, to wit, the power to declare that this alteration in the value of the coins _shall work a corresponding change in all existing contracts for the payment of money_. In reality they say that a contract to pay money is not a contract to pay any particular amount, or value, of such money as was known and understood by the parties at the time the contract was made, but _only such, and so much, as congress shall afterwards choose to call by that name, when the debt shall become due_. They assert that, by simply retaining the name, while altering the thing,--_or by simply giving an old name to a new thing_,--congress has power to utterly abolish the contract which the parties themselves entered into, and substitute for it any such new and different one, as they (congress) may choose to substitute. Here are their own words: