[135]. “Apart from the phraseology of the statutes it appears during the early years of the War the possibility of the payment of the bonds in other than coin was hardly raised. According to the explicit statement of Garfield in 1868, when the original five-twenty bond bill was before the House in 1862, all who referred to the subject stated that the principal of these bonds was payable in gold, and coin payment was the understanding of every member of the committee of ways and means.... It thus became practically an unwritten law to pay the obligations of the United States in coin.”—Dewey: Financial History of the United States, paragraph 148.
[136]. Hepburn: The Contest for Sound Money, p. 188.
[137]. Finance, p. 540, also Public Debts, p. 131.
[138]. Rice: The Father of His Country—Year Book.
[139]. The Economic Interpretation of History, p. 454. Italics mine. G. R. K.
[140]. Twenty-Eight Years (new edition Fifty Years) of Wall Street, p. 194.
[141]. Mr. Clews relates this whole matter in detail in his Twenty-Eight Years in Wall Street (new edition Fifty Years, etc.), in which noble tome naive conceit and the pleasures of self-contemplation beget an almost equal degree of incautious loquacity and innocent candor.
[142]. By “clear the decks,” and “unload,” when financial storms threaten, bankers mean that any soon-to-shrink stocks and bonds held by them are to be at once sold to (dumped upon) somebody else, to let somebody else stand the certain loss—just as a sinful deacon might sell to his neighboring fellow-worshipper a horse he was sure would die next day, or as an enterprising grocer might sell a rotten lemon to a blind child. It is “legitimate.” It is “opportunity.” It is “business.” And conscience is a nuisance to some people when there is “opportunity” to do “business.”
[143]. “It is a well-known fact that the War of the Rebellion was prolonged as a result of the manipulations of the speculators who invested in bonds. While the boys in blue were baring their breasts to the enemy in a heroic struggle to save the Union, for $13 per month, the bond sharks were speculating upon their necessities and the necessities of the Government. At one time President Lincoln was so exasperated by their greedy and unpatriotic actions that he declared they ‘ought to have their devilish heads shot off.’”—Congressman Vincent, of Kansas, in the House of Representatives, April 18, 1898.
[144]. History of the United States, Vol. IV., pp. 44–56.