Page:Debates in the Several State Conventions, v3.djvu/490

474 than I can, from his particular situation and judgment; but this has certainly escaped his attention. The question arising on the clause before you is, whether an act of the legislature of this state, for scaling money, will be of sufficient validity to exonerate you from paying the nominal value, when such a law, called ex post facto, and impairing the obligation of contracts, is expressly interdicted by it. Your hands are tied up by this clause, and you must pay shilling for shilling; and, in the last section, there is a clause that prohibits the general legislature from passing any ex post facto law; so that the hands of Congress are tied up, as well as the hands of the state legislatures.

How will this thing operate, when ten or twenty millions are demanded as the quota of this state? You will cry out that speculators have got it at one for a thousand, and that they ought to be paid so. Will you then have recourse, for relief, to legislative interference? They cannot relieve you, because of that clause. The expression includes public contracts, as well as private contracts between individuals. Notwithstanding the sagacity of the gentleman, he cannot prove its exclusive relation to private contracts. Here is an enormous demand, which your children, to the tenth generation, will not be able to pay. Should we ask if there be any obligation in justice to pay more than the depreciated value, we shall be told that contracts must not be impaired. Justice may make a demand of millions, but the people cannot pay them.

I remember the clamors and public uneasiness concerning the payments of British debts put into the treasury. Was not the alarm great and general lest these payments should be laid on the people at large? Did not the legislature interfere, and pass a law to prevent it? Was it not reechoed every where, that the people of this country ought not to pay the debts of their great ones? And though some urged their patriotism and merits in putting money, on the faith of the public, into the treasury, yet the outcry was so great that it required legislative interference. Should those enormous demands be made upon us, would not legislative interference be more necessary than it was in that case? Let us not run the risk of being charged with carelessness, and neglect of the interests of our constituents and posterity. I would ask the number of millions. It is, without exaggeration,