The New Orleans crescent. [volume] (New Orleans, La.) 1866-1869, 1869-02-17
TWO LEGAL TENDERS.

Whether the emission of paper currency
by governments ID in any case a necessary or
an eligible method of borrowing money, is
very questionable. 1t has been common to
commend the policy upon the supposition
that the public borrower, by this means,
could without delay cash its credit and save
the interest on the resulting debt. But the
idea that anything is thus saved in the way
| of interest is an egregious fallacy. Interest
has not been charged against the United
States government on greenbacks, to be sure,
| but it has been collected nevertheless. Dis
count gouged it out of the nominal value of
these potes to begin with, and the same mex
orable calculator and collector has been exac-
ting it ever since along with the price of every
commodity which this so-called money has
purchased. Equally fallacious has been the
notion that the legal tender faculty improved
the financial virtue or enhanced the purcha-
sing power of greenbacks. As authentic evil
dences of national Indebtedness, they have
been invariably at par with the fuctuating
rate of the national credit, and it is mathe-
matically impossible that they could have
been either more or less. The only
effect Of the legal tender provis-
ion was to sanction the robbing of
such private creditors as we're legally con-
strained to cancellation of twenty-five,
thirty, forty or fifty per cent. of the price of
property sold on the basis of specie cur
rency. Hence the legal tender faculty, if it
gained anything, for anybody, did so simply
in the character of a plundering faculty. In
all other aspects this quality was an inept
superiuity, without consequence and signif-
canoe; and the craftsmanship which it was
awhile ago the fashion to laud to the echo
for this financial conception, will hereafter
be classed by history with the wisdom which
once fancied that the money of the realm
could be doubled by proportionate adultera-
ton or subdivision of the current coin. The
decision of the United States Supreme Court
that gold is also legal tender for payment
in which, when expressly stipulated, contracts
may be enforced, will go far, no doubt, to ex-
pose the financial humbuggery of making
the evidences of the national Indebtedness
a compulsory acquittance of all private
debts and to the same extent it will
promote the resumption of specie payments
People will at length reflect that all
along, if they really made an honest payment
or received an honest payment, they paid or
they received specie, or its equivalent If
then, specie or its equivalent, must at last,
and necessarily, measure the value of what
ever deprecated and fuctuating paper they
may use in collecting or discharging debts,
why should they not base their sales, pur-
chases and contracts, directly on this substan-
tisl and indestructible value This is the
way, it is to be presumed, that people will
gradually come to reason, and that by cor
responding graduation the use of gold and
silver in commercial transactions will be re-
sumed. Of course the process will be slow,
and perhaps its completion will be vexa-
tiously and indefinitely deferred by the
maintenance of the legal tender
clause and by the continuance of the prohibit
tory tax on the circulation of bank notes 9TH
er than those based on national securities and
redeenable in greenbacks. But since the
c-r---- CT L. -z~~iSl~a a.us spvvtv Is a
legal tender, the idea of having two legal ten
ders with disparity of twenty-five or thirty
per cent. in their relative values, is almost
too absurd to admit of the supposition that
the law-making power in the United States,
if not in the hands of congenital idiots, will |
permit such q state of things to be prolonged |
We know that it is grsvely objected by some |
that the repeal of the legal tender clause
uro and fba
of gold and silver to meet its immediate |
wants. But it does not follow that paper |
money would not still be available. In |
specie paying times, bank notes constituted |
two-thirds, perhaps, of the money in circu-
lation. Take away the legal tender character
of greenbacks, and the prohibitory tax on
ordinary bank notes, and the currency would
again be composed of specie and paper in
about their former proportions. But even
grant that bank notes would not be forth
coming to supply the deficiency. Greenbacks,
if not redeemed in specie by the govern
ment-an extremely unlikely event-would |
be available for the purpose Of effecting CON-
mercial transactions, at precisely what they
are worth, just as they are now, with only
this difference: that the discount upon them
would be deducted from their face, instead of
being added to the price of merchandise.
This mode of equation would be more natural,
and, we believe, more convenient than the
present one. At all events, it is shorter work
to mark down the price of deprecated cur
rency than to mark up the price of miscel-
aneous stock of dry goods or of other prop
critics, real or personal, varying in amount
and actual cost.
When Butler appealed from Wade's decision
n the Georgia case, the emphatic vice-pres-
In,nx IL