The bill closes with a provision authorizing contracts in coin, instead of greenbacks, according to the agreement of parties. This authority is in harmony with the other provisions of the bill, and is still another step toward specie payments.
I am now brought to the last branch of this discussion, in which all the others are absorbed: I mean the necessity of specie payments, or, in other words, the necessity of coin in the place of inconvertible paper. Other things are means to this end: this is the end itself. Until this is accomplished, Financial Reconstruction exists in aspiration only, and not in reality.
The suspension of specie payments was originally a war measure, like the suspension of the Habeas Corpus. It was so declared by myself at the time it was authorized. Pardon me, if I quote my own words in the debate on the bill:—
“It is a discretion kindred to that under which the Habeas Corpus is suspended, so that citizens are arrested without the forms of law,—kindred to that under which an extensive territory is declared to be in a condition of insurrection, so that all business with its inhabitants is suspended,—kindred to that, which unquestionably exists, to obtain soldiers, if necessary, by draft or conscription instead of the free offering of volunteers,—kindred to that under which private property is taken for public uses,—and kindred, also, to that undoubted discretion which sanctions the completest exercise of the transcendent right of self-defence.”[238]
As a war measure, it should cease with the war, or so soon thereafter as practicable. It should not be continued a day beyond positive exigency. While the war lasted, it was a necessity, as the war itself. Its continuance now prolongs into peace this belligerent agency, and projects its disturbing influence into the most distant places. Like war, whose greatest engine it was, it is the cause of incalculable evil. Like war, it troubles the entire Nation, deranges business, and demoralizes the people. As I hate war, so do I hate all its incidents, and long to see them disappear. Already in these remarks I have pictured the financial anarchy of our country, the natural reflection of the political; but the strongest illustration is in a disordered currency, which is present to everybody with a dollar in his pocket.
The derangement of business may be seen at home and abroad. It is not merely derangement; it is dislocation. Everything is out of joint. Business has its disease also, showing itself in opposite conditions: shrunk at times, as with paralysis; swollen at times to unhealthy proportions, as with elephantiasis. The first condition of business is stability, which is only another form of security; but this is impossible, when nobody can tell from day to day the value of the currency. It may change in a night. The reasonable contract of to-day may become onerous beyond calculation to-morrow. There is no fixed standard. The seller is afraid to sell, the buyer afraid to buy. Nobody can sell or buy a farm, nobody can build or mortgage a house, except at an unnatural hazard. Salaries and all fixed incomes suffer. The pay of every soldier in the army, every sailor in the navy, every office-holder from the President to the humblest postmaster, is brought under this tyrannical influence. Harder still, innocent pensioners, wards of the Nation, must bear the same doom. Maimed soldiers, bereaved widows, helpless orphans, whose cup is already full, are compelled to see their scanty dole shrink before their sight till it seems ready to vanish in smoke.
A greenback is a piece of paper with a promise on its face and green on its back, declared to be money by Act of Congress, but which the Government refuses to pay. It is “failed paper” of the Government. The mischief of such a currency is everywhere, enveloping the whole country and penetrating all its parts. It covers all and enters all. It is a discredit to the national name, from which the Nation suffers in whole and in detail. It weakens the Nation and hampers the citizen. There is no national enterprise which it does not impede. The Pacific Railroad feels it. There is not a manufacture or business which does not feel it also. There is not a town, or village, or distant place, which it does not visit.
A practical instance will show one way in which individuals suffer on an extensive scale, being generally those who are least able. I follow an ingenious merchant, Mr. Atkinson, of Boston, whose figures sustain his conclusion, when I insist that our present currency, from its unstable character, operates as an extra tax of more than one hundred millions annually on the labor and business of the country; and this vast sum is taken from the pockets of the people, not for the support of the Government, but to swell the unreported fund out of which the excesses of the present day are maintained. There are few business men who would not put the annual loss in their affairs, from the fluctuation in the currency, somewhere from one to five per cent. One per cent. is the lowest. Mr. Hazard, of Rhode Island, puts it at two per cent. Now the aggregate sales in the fiscal year ending June, 1867, were over eleven thousand millions ($11,000,000,000) in currency, excluding sales of stocks or bonds. One per cent. on this prodigious amount represents a tax of one hundred and ten millions, paid annually by consumers, according to their consumption, and not in any degree according to their ability. This is one instance only of the damages annually paid on account of our currency. If we estimate the annual tax at more than one per cent., the sum-total will be proportionally larger. Even at the smallest rate, it is many millions more than all the annual expenses of our Government immediately preceding the Rebellion.