templated a statute without
considering that paramount constitutional provisions might control or
qualify that statute, or abrogate it altogether, is unreasonable and
inadmissible. "This contract," says one of the authorities relied on,
"is to be construed as if the law were specially recited in it." Let it
be so for the sake of argument. But it is also to be construed as if the
prohibitory clause of the Constitution were recited in it, and this
brings us back again to the precise point from which we departed.

The Constitution always accompanies the law, and the latter can have no
force which the former does not allow to it. If the reasoning were
thrown into the form of special pleading, it would stand thus: the
plaintiff declares on his debt; the defendant pleads his discharge under
the law; the plaintiff alleges the law unconstitutional; but the
defendant says, You knew of its existence; to which the answer is
obvious and irresistible, I knew its existence on the statute-book of
New York, but I knew, at the same time, it was null and void under the
Constitution of the United States.

The language of another leading decision is, "A law in force at the time
of making the contract does not violate that contract"; but the very
question is, whether there be any such law "in force"; for if the States
have no authority to pass such laws, then no such law can be in force.
The Constitution is a part of the contract as much as the law, and was
as much in the contemplation of the parties. So that the proposition, if
it be admitted that the law is part of the contract, leaves us just
where it found us: that is to say, under the necessity of comparing the
law with the Constitution, and of deciding by such comparison whether it
be valid or invalid. If the law be unconstitutional, it is void, and no
party can be supposed to have had reference to a void law. If it be
constitutional, no reference to it need be supposed.

2. But the proposition itself cannot be maintained. The law is no part
of the contract. What part is it? the promise? the consideration? the
condition? Clearly, it is neither of these. It is no term of the
contract. It acts upon the contract only when it is broken, or to
discharge the party from its obligation after it is broken. The
municipal law is the force of society employed to compel the performance
of contracts. In every judgment in a suit on contract, the damages are
given, and the imprisonment of the perso