The congress shall have power to borrow money.
Can any one see any connection between the power of congress "to borrow money," and its power to establish a monopoly of money?
Certainly no such connection is visible to the legal eye. But it is distinctly visible to the political and financial eye; that is, to that class of men, for whom governments exist, and who own congresses and courts, and set in motion armies and navies, whenever they can promote their own interests by doing so.
To a government, whose usurpations and crimes have brought it to the verge of destruction, these men say:
Make bonds bearing six per cent. interest; sell them to us at half their face value; then give us a monopoly of money based upon these bonds—such a monopoly as will subject the great body of the people to a dependence upon us for the necessaries of life, and compel them to sell their labor and property to us at our own prices; then, under pretence of raising revenue to pay the interest and principal of the bonds, impose such a tariff upon imported commodities as will enable us to get fifty per cent. more for our own goods than they are worth; in short, pledge to us all the power of the government to extort for us, in the future, everything that can be extorted from the producers of wealth, and we will lend you all the money you need to maintain your power.
And the government has no alternative but to comply with this infamous proposal, or give up its infamous life.
This is the only real connection there is between the power of congress "to borrow money," and its power to establish a monopoly of money. It was only by an outright sale of the rights of the whole people, for a long series of years, that the government could raise the money necessary to continue its villainous existence.
Congress had just as much constitutional power "to borrow money," by the sale of any and all the other natural rights of the people at large, as it had "to borrow money" by the sale of the people's natural rights to lend and hire money.
When the Supreme Court of the United States—assuming to be an oracle, empowered to define authoritatively the legal rights of every human being in the country—declares that congress has a constitutional power to prohibit the use of all that immense mass of money capital, in the shape of promissory notes, which the real property of the country is capable of supplying and sustaining, and which is sufficient to give to every laboring person, man or woman, the means of independence and wealth—when that court says that congress has power to prohibit the use of all this money capital, and grant to a few men a monopoly of money that shall condemn the great body of wealth-producers to hopeless poverty, dependence, and servitude—and when the court has the audacity to make these declarations on such nakedly false and senseless grounds as those that have now been stated, it is clearly time for the people of this country to inquire what constitutions and governments are good for, and whether they (the people) have any natural right, as human beings, to live for themselves, or only for a few conspirators, swindlers, usurpers, robbers, and tyrants, who employ lawmakers, judges, etc., to do their villainous work upon their fellow-men.
The court gave their sanction to the monopoly of money in these three separate cases, viz.: Veazie Bank vs. Fenno, 8 Wallace, 549 (1869). National Bank vs. United States, 101 U. S. Reports, 5 and 6 (1879). Juilliard vs. Greenman, 110 U. S. Reports 445-6 (1884).