National Bank of Hudson v. Jones, 105 Fed. 459; Louisiana v. Jumel, 107 U. S. 711.
In Fitts v. McGhee, supra, Mr. Justice Harlan, speaking for the court, said: "As a State can act only by its officers, an order restraining those officers from taking any steps, by means of judicial proceedings, in execution of the statute of February 9, 1895, is one which restrains the State itself, and the suit is consequently as much against the State as if the State were named as a party defendant on the record. If the individual defendants held possession of, or were about to take possession of, or to commit any trespass upon, any property belonging to or under the control of the plaintiffs, in violation of the latter's constitutional rights, they could not resist the judicial determination, in a suit against them, of the question of the right to such a possession by simply asserting that they held or were entitled to hold the property in their capacity as officers of the State."
In Farmers Nat. Bank v. Jones, supra, Judge Caldwell said: "As a State can perform its functions through officers and agents only, it was soon perceived that, if these officers and agents of the State were liable to be sued and coerced to comply with the judgments and decrees of a Federal court, the whole scope and purpose of the amendment would be nullified. * * * It is now settled that the jurisdiction in such cases is dependent upon the real, and not the nominal, parties to the suit, and it is now clear, both upon principle and authority, that a suit against the officers of a State to compel them to do acts which would impose a contractual pecuniary liability upon the State, or to issue any evidence of debt, in the name of the State, which would have that result, is in fact and legal effect a suit against the State, though the State itself is not named a party on the record."
In the Ayres case, supra, Mr. Justice Matthews, speaking for the Supreme Court of the United States, said: "A bill, the object of which is, by injunction, indirectly to compel the specific performance of the contract by forbidding all these acts and doings which constitute breaches of the contract, must also, necessarily, be a suit against the State. In such a case, though the State be not nominally a party on the record, if the defendants are its officers and agents, through whom alone it can act in doing and refusing to do the things which constitute a breach of
