"It will, of course, proclaim throughout the country a saturnalia of fraud, a carnival for rogues. Every agent, attorney, treasurer, trustee, guardian, executor, administrator, consignee, commission merchant, and every debtor of a fiduciary character, who has received for others money, hard money, worth 100 cents on the dollar, will forever release himself from liability by buying up for that knavish purpose, at its depreciated value, the spurious which we shall have put afloat. Everybody will do it, except those who are more honest than the American Congress advises them to be. Think of Savings Banks, entrusted with enormous aggregates of the pittances of the poor, the hungry and the homeless, the stranger, the needle woman, the widow and the orphan; and we are arranging for a robbery of 10 per cent, if not of 50 per cent, of the entire amount, and that by a contrivance so new, as never to have been discovered under the administrations of Monroe, Adams or James Buchanan....
"Such a step, if it should ever be taken by a Government, should be taken when everything else has failed, and the last extremity has been reached. It is the last expedient to which kings and nations can resort."
William Pitt Fessenden, of Maine, used this language:
"With regard to the particular bill now before the Senate, we all know that it was resorted to as a temporary measure, not in the beginning, but in consequence of the necessities of the treasury, arising from a greater expenditure than the Secretary could have imagined, and arising from the necessary delay with reference to other measures. Can it be said that a measure like the one now pending before the Senate and the country is a measure of a day or an hour? Why, what does it propose? It proposes something utterly unknown in this government from its foundation; a resort to a measure of doubtful constitutionality, to say the least of it, which has always been denounced as ruinous to the credit of any government, which has recourse to it; a measure, too, about which opinions in the community, as perhaps they never have been divided upon any other subject; a measure which, when it has been tried by other countries, as it often has been, has always proved a disastrous failure....
"Everybody who has spoken on this question, I believe without an exception—there may have been one or two—but all the opinions I have heard expressed, agree in this: that only with extreme reluctance, only with fear and trembling as to the consequences, can we have recourse to a measure like this of making our paper a legal tender in the payment of debt....
"A measure of this kind certainly cannot increase confidence in the ability, or the integrity of the country. It can make us no better than we are today, so far as the foundation of all public credit is concerned.
"Next, in my judgment it is a confession of bankruptcy. We begin and go out to the country with the declaration that we are unable to pay or borrow, at the present time, and such a confession is not calculated to increase our credit.
"Again, say what you will, nobody can deny that it is bad faith. If it be necessary for the salvation of the Government, all considerations of this kind must yield; but to make the best of it it is bad faith, and encourages bad morality both in public and in private. Going to the extent that it does to say that notes thus issued shall be receivable in payment of all private obligations, however contracted, is in its very essence a wrong, for it compels one man to take from his neighbor in payment of a debt that which he would not otherwise receive, or be obliged to receive, and what is probably not full payment....
"Again, in my judgment it must inflict a stain upon national honor. We owe debts abroad. Money has been loaned to this country, and to the people of this country, in good faith....