.[1603]

"Contracts," Extended to Cover Public Contracts.--Throughout
the first century of government under the Constitution, according to
Benjamin F. Wright, the contract clause had been considered in almost
forty per cent of all cases involving the validity of State legislation,
and of these the vast proportion involved legislative grants of one type
or other, the most important category being charters of
incorporation.[1604] Nor does this numerical prominence of such grants
in the cases overrate their relative importance from the point of view
of public interest. The question consequently arises whether the clause
was intended to be applied solely in protection of private contracts, or
in the protection also of public grants or, more broadly, in protection
of public contracts, in short, those to which a State is party?

Writing late in life, Madison explained the clause by allusion to what
had occurred "in the internal administration of the States," in the
years immediately preceding the Constitutional Convention, in regard to
private debts. "A violation of contracts," said he, "had become familiar
in the form of depreciated paper made a legal tender, of property
substituted for money, and installment laws, and the occlusions of the
courts of justice."[1605] He had, in fact, written to the same effect in
The Federalist, while the adoption of the Constitution was
pending.[1606]

The broader view of the intended purpose of the clause is,
nevertheless, not without considerable support. For one thing, the
clause departs from the comparable provision in the Northwest Ordinance
(1787) in two respects: First, in the _presence_ of the word
"obligation"; secondly, in the _absence_ of the word "private"; and
there is good reason for believing that Wilson may have been responsible
for both alterations, inasmuch as two years earlier he had denounced a
current proposal to repeal the Bank of North America's Pennsylvania
charter, in the following words: "If the act for incorporating the
subscribers to the Bank of North America shall be repealed in this
manner, a precedent will be established for repealing, in the same
manner, every other legislative charter in Pennsylvania. A pretence, as
specious as any that can be alleged on this occasion, will never be
wanting on any future occasion. Those acts of the State, which have
hitherto been considered as the sure anchors of privilege and of
property, will become the sport of every va