If such be the true nature of the plaintiffs' interests under this charter, what are the articles in the New Hampshire Bill of Rights which these acts infringe?
They infringe the second article; which says, that the citizens of the State have a right to hold and possess property. The plaintiffs had a legal property in this charter; and they had acquired property under it. The acts deprive them of both. They impair and take away the charter; and they appropriate the property to new uses, against their consent. The plaintiffs cannot now hold the property acquired by themselves, and which this article says they have a right to hold.
They infringe the twentieth article. By that article it is declared that, in questions of property, there is a right to trial. The plaintiffs are divested, without trial or judgment.
They infringe the twenty-third article. It is therein declared that no retrospective laws shall be passed. This article bears directly on the case. These acts must be deemed to be retrospective, within the settled construction of that term. What a retrospective law is, has been decided, on the construction of this very article, in the Circuit Court for the First Circuit, The learned judge of that circuit says: "Every statute which takes away or impairs vested rights, acquired under existing laws, must be deemed retrospective." That all such laws are retrospective was decided also in the case of _Dash v. Van Kleek_, where a most learned judge quotes this article from the constitution of New Hampshire, with manifest approbation, as a plain and clear expression of those fundamental and unalterable principles of justice, which must lie at the foundation of every free and just system of laws. Can any man deny that the plaintiffs had rights, under the charter, which were legally vested, and that by these acts those rights are impaired?
"It is a principle in the English law," says Chief Justice Kent, in the case last cited, "as ancient as the law itself, that a statute, even of its omnipotent Parliament, is not to have a retrospective effect. 'Nova constitutio futuris formam imponere debet, et non praeteritis.' The maxim in Bracton was taken from the civil law, for we find in that system the same principle, expressed substantially in the same words, that the law-giver cannot alter his mind to the prejudice of a vested right. 'Nemo potest mutare concilium suum in alterius injuriam.'"