imagine that the framers of our Constitution were strangers to it, and that, feeling the necessity and policy of giving permanence and security to contracts" generally, they yet deemed it desirable to leave this sort of contract subject to legislative interference. Such is Marshall's answer to Jefferson's outburst against "the dead hand." Characteristically, Marshall nowhere cites Fletcher vs. Peck in his opinion, but he builds on the construction there made of the "obligation of contracts" clause as clearly as do his associates, Story and Washington, who cite it again and again in their concurring opinion. Thus he concedes that the British Parliament, in consequence of its unlimited power, might at any time before the Revolution have annulled the charter of the College and so have disappointed the hopes of the donors; but, he adds, "the perfidy of the transaction would have been universally acknowledged." Later on, he further admits that at the time of the Revolution the people of New Hampshire succeeded to "the transcendent power of Parliament," as well as to that of the King, with the result that a repeal of the charter before 1789 could have been contested only under the State Constitution. "But the Constitution of the United States," he continues, "has imposed this additional limitation, that the Legislature of a State shall pass no act 'impairing the obligation of contracts.'" In short, as in Fletcher vs. Peck, what was originally a moral obligation is regarded as having been lifted by the Constitution into the full status of a legal one, and this time without any assistance from "the general principles of our free institutions." How is the decision of the Supreme Court in the case of Dartmouth College vs. Woodward to be assessed today? Logically the basis of it was repudiated by the Court itself within a decade, albeit the rule it lays down remained unaffected. Historically it is equally without basis, for the intention of the obligation of contracts clause, as the evidence amply shows, was to protect private executory contracts, and especially contracts of debt. ¹ In actual practice, on the other hand, the decision produced one considerable benefit: in the words of a contemporary critic, it put private institutions of learning and charity out of the reach of "legislative despotism and party violence." ¹ Much of the evidence is readily traceable through the Index to Max Farrand's Records of the Federal Convention.