(2) He wants you to give more explicitly your authority for contending that paper money is Constitutional; he combats the idea of the Constitutionality of a paper currency, asserting that gold and silver is the money of the Constitution and not paper.
(3) What is your authority for saying that Mr. Cleveland ruled that Governmental notes which were payable in coin should be redeemed in gold only? He disputes this.
(4) In your glowing description of the effects of paper currency, during the wars referred to by you, how it fed and clothed the soldier and kept starvation from those the soldiers left at home—he asserts that the gold and silver currency in circulation during the times you allude to could have accomplished all you claim; independent of a paper currency.
(5) Was the paper money issued by the Confederate Government during the Civil War as good at any time, during said war, as the paper money issued by the Federal Government during the same war? If not, why not?
Understand me, I am perfectly in accord with you. I am asking these questions in order that you may have an opportunity to knock the sophisticated props from under the gold bug delusions and the people given the plain facts.
Respectfully,
W. M. Hairston.
ANSWER.
(1) Yes. Gold and silver were used in commerce and commodities, even as precious metals, but not as legal tender money. The legal tender money of Sparta was of iron. Lycurgus made it so, for a special purpose. See Plutarch’s “Lives,” or Aristotle on “Government.”
The legal tender money of Rome was copper during all the long and bloody years of her relentless and resistless march to world-power.