New Hampshire chooses to enact, so long as it contravenes no
other constitutional provision.

Webster, in paving the way toward his claim that the charter was
a contract, and, as a vested right of property, inviolable by a
State, alluded to the sacredness of all rights under the
guaranties to be found in our American system of constitutional
government. It was not surprising that the Constitution of the
United States should protect them in the way he asserted. All
the States, and New Hampshire among them, had done the same in
placing the great features of _Magna Charta_ in their bills
of rights. What, he asked, was this law of the land by which all
things were to be tried and judged? This was his answer: "By the
law of the land is most clearly intended the general law; a law
which hears before it condemns; which proceeds upon inquiry, and
renders judgment only after trial. The meaning is that every
citizen shall hold his life, liberty, property and immunities
under the protection of the general rules which govern society.
Everything which may pass under the form of an enactment is not
therefore to be considered the law of the land. If this were so,
acts of attainder, bills of pains and penalties, acts of
confiscation, acts reversing judgments, and acts directly
transferring one man's estate to another, legislative judgments,
decrees and forfeitures in all possible forms, would be the law
of the land."[Footnote: "Works of Daniel Webster," V, 486.]

In the opinion by Mr. Justice Mathews in Hurtado _v._
California he observes: "It is not every act, legislative in
form, that is law. Law is something more than mere will exerted
as an act of power. It must be not a special rule for a