The whole case can be stated with perfect simplicity. To tax the bonds is to break the contract because you have the power. It is an imitation of the Roman governor, a lieutenant of Cæsar, who, after an agreement by the people of Gaul to pay a certain subsidy monthly, arbitrarily changed the number of months to fourteen. The subtraction from the interest by taxation is kindred in dishonesty to the increase of the Gaulish subsidy by adding to the months. Of course, in private contracts between merchant and merchant no such thing could be done. But there can be no rule of good faith binding on private individuals which is not binding on the Nation, while there are exceptional reasons for extraordinary scrupulousness on the part of the Nation. As the transaction is vast, and especially as the Nation is conspicuous, what is done becomes an example to the world which history cannot forget. A Nation cannot afford to do a mean thing. There is another reason, founded on the helpless condition of the creditor, who has no power to enforce his claim, whether of principal or interest. It was Charles James Fox who once exclaimed against a proposition kindred to that now made: “Oh, no, no! His claims are doubly binding who trusts to the rectitude of another.” This is only according to an admitted principle in the Laws of War, constraining the stronger power to the best of faith in dealing with a weaker power, because the latter is without the capacity to redress a wrong. This benign principle, borrowed from the Laws of War, cannot be out of place in the Laws of Peace; and I invoke it now as a sufficient protection against taxation of the bonds, even if common sense in its plainest lessons, and the rule of right in its most imperious precepts, did not forbid this thing.
The cheat of paying interest-bearing bonds in promises without interest is kindred in character to that of taxing the bonds. It is flat Repudiation. No subtlety of technicality, no ingenuity of citation, no skill in arranging texts of statutes, can make it anything else. It is so on the face, and it is so the more the transaction is examined. Here again I invoke that rule of conduct to a weaker party, and I insist, that, if, from any failure of explicitness excluding all contrary conclusion, there can be any reason for Repudiation, every such suggestion must be dismissed as the frightful well-spring of disastrous consequences impossible to estimate, while it is inconsistent with that Public Faith which is the supreme law.
Elsewhere I have considered this question so fully,[273] that I content myself now with conclusions only. Do you covet the mines of Mexico and Peru, the profits of extended commerce, or the harvest of your own teeming fields? All these and more you will multiply infinitely, if you will keep the Public Faith inviolate. Do you seek stability in the currency, with the assurance of solid business, so that extravagance and gambling speculations shall cease? This, too, you will have through the Public Faith. Just in proportion as this is discredited, the Nation is degraded and impoverished. If nobody had breathed Repudiation, we should all be richer, and the national debt would be at a lower interest, saving to the Nation millions of dollars annually. Talk of taxation; here is an annual tax of millions imposed by these praters of Repudiation.
Careless of all the teachings of history, you are exhorted to pay the national debt in greenbacks, knowing that this can be done only by creating successive batches, counted by hundreds of millions, which will bring our currency to the condition of Continental money, when a night’s lodging cost a thousand dollars, or the condition of the French assignats, the paper currency of the Revolution, which was increased to a fearful amount, precisely as it is now proposed to increase ours, until the story of Continental money was repeated. Talk of clipping the coin, or enfeebling it with alloy, as in mediæval times; talk of the disgraceful frauds of French monarchs, who, one after another in long succession, debased their money and swore the officers of the Mint to conceal the debasement; talk of persistent reductions in England, from Edward the First to Elizabeth, until coin was only the half of itself; talk of unhappy Africa, where Mungo Park found that a gallon of rum, which was the unit of value, was half water;—talk of all these; you have them on a colossal scale in the cheat of paying bonds with greenbacks. If not taught by our own memorable experience, when Continental money, which was the currency of the time, was lost, like the river Rhine at its mouth, in an enormous outstretched quicksand, then be taught by the experience of another country. Authentic history discloses the condition to which France was reduced. Carlyle, in his picturesque work on the Revolution, says: “There is, so to speak, no trade whatever, for the time being. Assignats, long sinking, emitted in such quantities, sink now with an alacrity beyond parallel.” The hackney-coachman on the street, when asked his fare, replied, “Six thousand livres.”[274] And still the assignats sunk, until at last the nation was a pauper. The Directory, invested for the time with supreme power, on repairing to the palace of the Luxembourg, found it without a single article of furniture. Borrowing from the door-keeper a rickety table, an inkstand, and a sheet of letter-paper, they draughted their first official message, announcing the new government. There was not a solitary piece of coin in the Treasury; but there was a printing-press at command. Assignats were fabricated in the night, and sent forth in the morning wet from the press.[275] At last they ended in nothing,—but not until a great and generous people was enveloped in bankruptcy and every family was a sufferer. Bankruptcy has its tragedies hardly inferior to those which throb beneath the “sceptred pall.”
Similar misconduct among us must result in similar consequences, with all the tragedies of bankruptcy. Not a bank, not a corporation, not an institution of charity, which would not suffer,—each sweeping multitudes into the abyss which it could not avoid. Business would be disorganized, values would be uncertain; nobody would know that the paper in his pocket to-day would buy a dinner to-morrow. There is no limit to the depreciation of inconvertible paper. Down, down it descends, as the plummet, to the bottom, or up, up, as the bubble in the air, until, whether down or up, it disappears. It is hard to think of the poor, or of those who depend on daily wages, under the trials of this condition. The rich may, for the time, live from their abundance; but the less favored class can have no such refuge. Therefore, for the poor, and for all who labor, do I now plead, when I ask that you shall not hearken to this painful proposition.
I plead, also, for the business of the country. So long as the currency continues in its present uncertainty, it cannot answer the demands of business. It is a diseased limb, no better than what is known in India as a “Cochin leg,” or an excrescence not unlike the pendulous goitre which is the pitiful sight of an Alpine village. But it must be uncertain, unless we have peace. Therefore, for the sake of the currency, do I unite with our candidate in his longing. Business must be emancipated. How often are we told by the lawyers, in a saying handed down from antiquity, that “a wretched servitude exists where the law is uncertain”! But this is not true of the law only. Nothing short of that servitude which denies God-given rights can be more wretched than the servitude of an uncertain currency. And now that, by the blessing of God, we are banishing that terrible wrong which was so long the curse and shame of our Nation, let us apply ourselves to this other servitude, whose yoke we are all condemned to bear in daily life.
Looking into the travels of Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, you will find that he encountered in China paper money on a large scale, being an inconvertible currency standing on the credit of the Grand Khan, not unlike our greenbacks. Describing the celestial city of Kin-sai, the famous traveller says, “The inhabitants are idolaters, and they use paper money”; and then describing another celestial city, Ta-pin-zu, he says, “The inhabitants worship idols, and use paper money.”[276] I know not if Marco Polo intended by this association to suggest any dependence of paper money upon the worship of idols. It is enough that he puts them together. To my mind they are equally forbidden by the Ten Commandments. If one Commandment enjoins upon us not to worship any graven image, does not another say expressly, “Thou shalt not steal”?
There is another consideration, which I have reserved for the last, and which I would call an issue in the pending election. It is nothing less than the good name of the Republic, and its character as an example to the Nations. All this is directly in question. If you are true to the great principles of Equal Rights, declared by our fathers as the foundation of just government,—if you stand by the freedman and maintain him in well-earned citizenship,—if you require full payment of the national debt in coin, principal and interest, at the pleasure of the holder, so that the Republic shall have the crown of perfect honesty, as also of perfect freedom,—I do not doubt that it will exercise a far-reaching sway. Nothing captivates more than the example of virtue,—not even the example of vice. By this sign conquer: by fidelity to declared principles, by the performance of all promises, by a good name. Then will American history supply the long-sought definition of a Republic, and our Western star will illumine the Nations.
Reverse the picture, let the Rebel Party prevail, and what do we behold? The bonds of the Nation repudiated, and the Equal Rights of the freedman, which are nothing but bonds of the Nation, repudiated also. Alas! the example of the Republic is lost, and our Western star is quenched in darkness. But this cannot be without a shock, as when our first parents tasted the forbidden fruit:—