Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 1.djvu/102

 control over money and the currency which is given to Congress, then it cannot well be denied to our national government. Such legislation may or may not be highly objectionable. It may in a perilous time be useful, and even necessary, to the proper discharge of the duty of a government. Or it may in ordinary times be very immoral and even outrageous legislation. But it is not for a Court to act as the keeper of the legislative judgment or the legislative conscience on a legislative question. When, in the early part of the war that was carried on here twenty odd years ago, the State banks broke down, it was thought by Congress highly important, if not absolutely necessary, that the government should furnish a currency to the country; commerce could not go on without it; there was not coin enough to do the business of the country. The emission of government bills of credit was a natural and suitable method, not merely of doing other things, but of supplying a currency. And in the straits to which we were then reduced, the credit of the government being gravely in doubt, foreign nations expecting our downfall, and our own people fearful of the result, even the government promises could not command confidence. At such a time a currency resting only on the government credit would not, it was thought, do the office of a medium of exchange, or would not do it reasonably well, without giving it the full, usual and legal quality of money; with that quality it served the purpose. If it be said, as it has been said, that it would have served the purpose as well, or better, if to each note had been annexed the right to ride in every railway car in the country, to enter places of public amusement and the like, the answer is, that it is true that such privileges would have helped; but these incidents would have been foreign to the purposes of a currency. To make the currency do the usual office of money more effectually and fully, is legitimate regulation of the currency. To make it do the special office of theatre tickets or railroad tickets is superadding to its quality as currency, as money, or its equivalent, another and foreign quality.

2. Congress, having the power to furnish a paper currency, and to give to that currency such qualities as may make it do the full and usual office of money, may use its own currency, in any of its forms, in order to borrow money. And, in combining these