drawn to the distinction between criminal laws and laws relating to civil interests. In order to reach and control retrospective laws operating upon the civil rights of parties, when passed by a State, a special description was employed to designate them, as "laws impairing the obligation of contracts," and the term "_ex post facto_ laws" was thus confined to laws creating and punishing criminal offences after the acts had been committed.[298] What is now the settled construction of this term, therefore, is in accordance with the sense in which it was finally intended to be used by the framers of the Constitution before the instrument passed from their hands. The committee of detail had reported in their draft of the Constitution a clause which restrained the United States from granting any title of nobility. The Convention, for the purpose of preserving all officers of the United States independent of external influence, added to this a provision that no person holding an office of profit or trust under the United States shall, without the consent of Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.[299] In addition to the special powers conferred by the Constitution upon the national government, it has imposed certain restraints on the political power of the States, which qualify and diminish what would otherwise be the unlimited sovereignty of each of them. These restraints are of two classes;--a part of them being designed to remove all obstructions that might be placed by State legislation or action in the way of the appropriate exercise of the powers vested in the United States, and a part of them being intended to assimilate the nature of the State governments to that of the Union, by the application of certain maxims or rules of public policy. These restraints may now be briefly examined, with reference to this classification. The idea of imposing special restrictions upon the power of the separate States was not expressly embraced in the plan of government described by the resolutions on which the committee of detail were instructed to prepare the instrument of government. Such restrictions, however, were not unknown to the previous theory of the Union. They existed in the Articles of Confederation, where they had been introduced with the same general purpose of withdrawing from the action of the States those objects, which, by the stipulations of that instrument, had been committed to the authority of the United States in Congress. But the inefficacy of those provisions lay in the fact, that they were the mere provisions of a theory. The step now proposed to be taken was to superadd to the prohibitions themselves the principle of their supremacy as matters of fundamental law, and to enable the national judiciary to make that supremacy effectual.