Page:Debates in the Several State Conventions, v3.djvu/492

476 of amending it, by enabling the state legislatures to relieve their people from such nefarious oppressions.

Mr. GEORGE NICHOLAS. Mr. Chairman, I beg gentlemen to consider most attentively the clause under consideration, and the objections against it. He says there exists the most dangerous prospect. Has the legislature of Virginia any right to make a law or regulation to interfere with the Continental debts? Have they a right to make ex post facto laws, and laws impairing the obligation of contracts, for that purpose? No, sir. If his fears proceed from this clause, they are without foundation. This clause does not hinder them from doing it, because the state never could do it; the Jurisdiction of such general objects being exclusively vested in Congress.

But, says he, this clause will hinder the general government from preventing the nominal value of those millions from being paid. On what footing does this business stand, if the Constitution be adopted? By it all contracts will be as valid, and only as valid, as under the old Confederation. The new government will give the holders the same power of recovery as the old one. There is no law under the existing system which gives power to any tribunal to enforce the payment of such claims. On the will of Congress alone the payment depends. The Constitution expressly says that they shall be only as binding as under the present Confederation. Cannot they decide according to real equity? Those who have this money must make application to Congress for payment. Some positive regulation must be made to redeem it. It cannot be said that they have power of passing a law to enhance its value. They cannot make a law that that money shall no longer be but one for one; for, though they have power to pay the debts of the United States, they can only pay the real debts; and this is no further a debt than it was before. Application must, therefore, be made by the holders of that money to Congress, who will make the most proper regulation to discharge its real and equitable, and not its nominal, value.

We are told of the act passed to exonerate the public from the payments of the British debts put into the treasury. That has no analogy to this: those payments were opposed because they were unjust. But he supposes that Congress may be sued by those speculators. Where is the clause that