It will be for the other side to show that the nature of the use decides the question whether the legislature has power to resume its grants.  It will be for those who maintain such a doctrine to show the principles and cases upon which it rests.  It will be for them also to fix the limits and boundaries of their doctrine, and to show what are and what are not such uses as to give the legislature this power of resumption and revocation.  And to furnish an answer to the cases cited, it will be for them further to show that a grant for the use and support of religious worship stands on other ground than a grant for the promotion of piety and learning.

I hope enough has been said to show that the trustees possessed vested liberties, privileges, and immunities, under this charter; and that such liberties, privileges, and immunities, being once lawfully obtained and vested, are as inviolable as any vested rights of property whatever.  Rights to do certain acts, such, for instance, as the visitation and superintendence of a college and the appointment of its officers, may surely be vested rights, to all legal intents, as completely as the right to possess property.  A late learned judge of this court has said, “When I say that a right is vested in a citizen, I mean that he has the power to do certain actions, or to possess certain things, according to the law of the land."[36]

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."[37] That all such laws are retrospective was decided also in the case of Dash v.  Van Kleek,[38] 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?