the State excluded from the operation of the provision? Is the clause to be considered as inhibiting the State from impairing the obligation of contracts between two individuals, but as excluding from that inhibition contracts made with itself? The words themselves contain no such distinction. They are general and are applicable to contracts of every description.

It has also been decided, that a grant by a State before the Revolution is as much to be protected as a grant since. But the case of Terret v. Taylor, before cited, is of all others most pertinent to the present argument. Indeed, the judgment of the court in that case seems to leave little to be argued or decided in this. "A private corporation," says the court, "created by the legislature, may lose its franchises by a misuser or nonuser of them; and they may be resumed by the government under a judicial judgment upon a quo warranto to ascertain and enforce the forfeiture. This is the common law of the land, and is the tacit condition annexed to the creation of every such corporation. . . . But that the legislature can repeal statutes creating private corporations or confirming to them property already acquired under the faith of previous laws, and by such repeal can vest the property of such corporations exclusively in the State, or dispose of the same to such purposes as they please, without the consent or default of the corporators, we are not prepared to admit; and we think ourselves standing upon the principles of natural justice, upon the fundamental laws of every free government, upon the spirit and letter of the Constitution of the United States, and upon the decisions of most respectable judicial tribunals, in resisting such a doctrine."

This court, then, does not admit the doctrine, that a legislature can repeal statutes creating private corporations. If it cannot repeal them altogether, of course it cannot repeal any part of them, or impair them, or essentially alter them, without the consent of the corporators. If, therefore, it has

been shown that this college is to be regarded as a private charity, this case is embraced within the very terms of that decision. A grant of corporate powers and privileges is as much a contract as a grant of land. What proves all charters of this sort to be contracts is, that they must be accepted to give them force and effect. If they are not accepted, they are void. And in the case of an existing corporation, if a new charter is given it, it may even accept part and reject the rest.

There are, in this case, all the essential constituent parts of a contract. There is something to be contracted about, there are parties, and there are plain terms in which the agreement of the parties on the subject of the contract is expressed. There are mutual considerations and inducements. The charter recites, that the founder, on his part, has agreed to establish his seminary in New Hampshire, and to enlarge it beyond its original design, among other things, for the benefit of that Province; and there upon a charter is given to him and his associates, designated by himself, promising and assuring to them, under the plighted faith of the State, the right of governing the college and administering its concerns in the manner provided in the charter. There is a complete and perfect grant to them of all the power of superintendence, visitation, and government. Is not this a contract? If lands or money had been granted to him and his associates, for the same purposes, such grant could not be rescinded. And is there any difference, in legal contemplation, between a grant of corporate franchises and a grant of tangible property? No such difference is recognized in any decided case, nor does it exist in the common apprehension of mankind.

It is therefore contended, that this case falls within the true meaning of this provision of the Constitution, as expounded in the decisions of this court; that the charter of 1769 is a contract, a stipulation or agreement, mutual in its considerations, express and formal in its terms, and of a most binding

and solemn nature. That the acts in question impair this contract, has been sufficiently shown. They repeal and abrogate its most essential parts.

107. Inductive reasoning. The deductive method is a very important and useful method of reasoning, but it has its limitations. Its great defectis that, of itself, it is powerless to aid us in the discovery of new truth. Every conclusion we arrive at by this method is but the rendering clear, or the making application of, some particular truth involved in a more general one, and therefore by implication already known. When we wish to find out new truth, to make new generalizations or establish new laws, we must proceed by the inductive method. In inductive reasoning, we start with particular facts or truths known to us from our observation and seek to find some general truth or principle underlying them and giving them meaning or unity.

A conclusion arrived at by the inductive method, once it is established, may be used, of course, as a starting point for a deductive argumentation. Thus a writer, in endeavoring to establish a given truth, may use both the inductive and the deductive methods in one and the same discourse. He may proceed now by means of the one and again by means of the other, using them in succession and each as an aid and support to the other. As a matter of fact, reasoning in this way is much more common than reasoning by the purely inductive, or the purely deductive method. It is the method the mind naturally employs in un

studied and informal reasoning. "Our thought," says Professor Creighton, "uses every means which will help it to its desired end. It is often able, after pushing its inquiries a little way, to discover some general principle, or to guess what the law of connection must be. When this is possible, it is found profitable to proceed deductively, and to show what results necessarily follow from the truth of such a general law. Of course, it is always essential to verify results obtained in this deductive way, by comparing them with the actual facts. But in general, the best results are obtained when induction and deduction go hand in hand."1

Inductive reasoning is essentially the endeavor to establish causes for the phenomena which have engaged our attention. When we note facts and seek an explanation of these facts, we reason inductively. In this search for the explanation we desire, our ordinary procedure is first to make a guess as to what that explanation is and then to try to find out whether our guess is correct or not. Thus, in the whole process of inductive reasoning, three distinct steps are distinguishable:

(a) Observation, or the gathering of the particular facts to be used as the basis of the induction.

(b) The making of an hypothesis, or the provisional explanation of the facts.

(c) Verification, or the comparison of deductions from the hypothesis with known facts or principles.

1 J. E. Creighton, Introductory Logic, pp. 174, 175.

It is not to be inferred that these steps are always recognizable in the actual discourse. There, the gathering of the facts is usually regarded as mere preliminary work and is taken for granted. Ordinarily, the writer begins his argumentation with some reference to his hypothesis, which may be stated explicitly at the beginning or left as a matter of inference for the reader. Huxley, for example, after a few prefatory remarks, begins his Three Lectures on Evolution thus:

So far as I know, there are only three hypotheses which ever have been entertained, or which well can be entertained, respecting the past history of Nature. I will, in the first place, state the hypotheses, and then I will consider what evidence bearing upon them is in our possession, and by what light of criticism that evidence is to be interpreted.

Upon the first hypothesis, the assumption is, that phenomena of Nature similar to those exhibited by the present world have always existed; in other words, that the universe has existed from all eternity in what may be broadly termed its present condition.

The second hypothesis is, that the present state of things has had only a limited duration; and that, at some period in the past, a condition of the world, essentially sim lar to that which we now know, ame into existence, without any precedent condition from which it could have naturally proceeded. The assumption that suc essive states of Nature have aris n, each without any relation o natural causation to an antecedent state, is a mere modification of this second hypothesis.

The third hypothesis also assumes that the present state of things has had but a limited duration; but it supposes that