demanded it, and the people have sanctioned it with a unanimity almost unparalleled. If the constitutionality of this subject were brought before the federal judiciary, I have little doubt that the law would be declared null and void, and the State, by such a decision of persons neither interested in her policy nor responsible to her citizens, deprived of the power of relief in these times of overwhelming difficulty." No State shall pass any law impairing the obligation of contracts. "The Constitution recognizes a principle of morality founded on justice'and religion. * * * Each State is the judge of its own honor and the keeper of its own conscience." "The fund upon which executions shall operate is a regulation of a political character and subject to the absolute control of the Legislature. That fund may be extended or contracted at the will of the State." In 1821 Kentucky abolished imprisonment for debt, but at the same session of the Legislature, extended the prison bounds to the limits of the county, "under a belief that the federal judiciary will declare this law abolishing imprisonment for debt unconstitutional, as impairing the obligation of contracts."
Stay laws, paper money, squatters' rights and State rights had now become intertwined, and acted and reacted on one another, constantly intensifying the popular exasperation against vested rights, creditors, the Bank of the United States, and the federal government.
In a great political debate, in the Senate of the State, in 1838, Wickliffe reviewed all this history in the face of the men who had had part in it. He denied that the Bank of the United States had ruined Kentucky. He referred to the creation and repeal of the forty banks, and to the sacrifice of the Bank of Kentucky to try to bolster up those banks, and then its destruction. "It was this outrage against the rights of contract and the sacred honor of legislators that prostrated Kentucky, and not the Bank of the United States. These mad measures left the country nothing but the Bank of the United States to hang upon. She kept the even tenor of her way. * * * No, sir, it was not the Bank of the United States but independent bank makers, property law makers, judge breakers, and paper money schemers that then ruled and ruined Kentucky."
In no case which we have found, did any Court of any grade, in any State, support the stay laws. The next step in this history, which we have to notice, is a collision between the people of the State of Kentucky represented in the Legislature, and their own judiciary.
Judge Clark decided the case of Williams vs. Blair, at the Bourbon Circuit Court, ordering the recognizance of the defendant to be quashed with costs against him, the endorsement act of 1820 being unconstitutional. May 28, 1822, a Committee of the House of Representatives was appointed "to inquire into the decision of [Judge Clark] and report thereon to this House." The preamble recited that the Judge had "given a decision in contravention of the laws of this Commonwealth called the endorsement and replevin laws, and therein has grossly transcended his judicial authority and disregarded the constitutional powers of the Legislature of this Common-
