The friends of the College set promptly to work to bring over the wavering judges. To their dismay they learned that Chancellor James Kent of New York, whose views were known to have great weight with Justices Johnson and Livingston, had expressed himself as convinced by Chief Justice Richardson's opinion that Dartmouth College was a public corporation. Fortunately, however, a little ransacking of the records brought to light an opinion which Kent and Livingston had both signed as early as 1803, when they were members of the New York Council of Revision, and which took the ground that a then pending measure in the New York Legislature for altering the Charter of New York City violated "due process of law." At the same time, Charles Marsh, a friend of both Kent and Webster, brought to the attention of the former Webster's argument before Marshall at Washington in March, 1818. Then came a series of conferences at Albany in which Chancellor Kent, Justice Johnson, President Brown of Dartmouth College, Governor Clinton, and others participated. As a result, the Chancellor owned himself converted to the idea that the College was a private institution. The new term of court opened on Monday, February 1, 1819. William Pinkney, who in vacation had accepted a retainer from the backers of Woodward, that is, of the State, took his stand on the second day near the Chief Justice, expecting to move for a reargument. Marshall, "turning his blind eye" to the distinguished Marylander, announced that the Court had reached a decision, plucked from his sleeve an eighteen folio manuscript opinion, and began reading it. He held that the College was a "private eleemosynary institution"; that its charter was the outgrowth of a contract between the original donors and the Crown, that the trustees represented the interest of the donors, and that the terms of the Constitution were broad enough to cover and protect this representative interest. The last was the only point on which he confessed a real difficulty. The primary purpose of the constitutional clause, he owned, was to protect "contracts the parties to which have a vested beneficial interest" in them, whereas the trustees had no such interest at stake. But, said he, the case is within the words of the rule, and "must be within its operation likewise, unless there be something in the literal construction" obviously at war with the spirit of the Constitution, which was far from the fact. For, he continued, "it requires no very critical examination of the human mind to enable us to determine that one great inducement to these gifts is the conviction felt by the giver that the disposition he makes of them is immutable. All such gifts are made in the pleasing, perhaps delusive hope, that the charity will flow forever in the channel which the givers have marked out for it. If every man finds in his own bosom strong evidence of the universality of this sentiment, there can be but little reason to