In placing the obligation of contracts under the protection of the Constitution, its framers looked to the essentials of the contract more than to the forms and modes of proceeding by which it was to be carried out into execution; annulling State legislation which impaired the obligation, it was left to the States to prescribe and shape the remedy to enforce it. The obligation of a contract consists in its binding force on the party who makes it. This depends on the laws in existence when it is made; these are necessarily referred to in all contracts and forming a part of them as the measure of the obligation to perform them by the one party, and the right acquired by the other. There can be no other standard by which to ascertain the extent of either, than that which the terms of the contract indicate according to their settled legal meaning; when it becomes consummated, the law defines the duty and the right, compels one party to perform the thing contracted for, and gives the other a right to enforce the performance by the remedies then in force. If any subsequent law affect to diminish the duty, or to impair the right, it necessarily bears on the obligation of the contract, in favor of one party, to the injury of the other; hence, any law which, in its operation, amounts to a denial, or obstruction, of the rights accruing by a contract, though professing to act only on the remedy, is directly obnoxious to the prohibition of the Constitution.[200] 78. The prohibition of legislation impairing the obligation of contracts does not extend to the United States as it does to the States. Thus in the Legal Tender Cases[201] and in sundry bankruptcy cases.[202] the Supreme Court has decided that the exercise of the power of Congress “does not depend upon the incidental effect of its exercise on contracts, but on the existence of the power itself.” This means that the United States possesses a police power, _salus populi suprema lex_, in exercise of which at the discretion of Congress, the obligation of contracts must yield to the higher obligation of the general welfare.[203]