Page:Is Capital Income, Earle, 1921.djvu/40

40 * * * The very naming of your measures is a complete refutation of anti-Federalism, paper money and tender acts, for no man chooses such company in argument. The distress to which many of your best citizens are reduced * * * of widows and orphans, demonstrates that unhappiness follows vice by the unalterable laws of nature and society. * * * The whole Union has seen and fears, and while history gives true information, no other people will ever repeat the studied process of fraud."

It was upon this argument that in the next year the Constitution was adopted, and this prediction held true through all the difficulties of our subsequent wars and throughout the following generations until the Supreme Court reversed itself in the later Legal Tender decisions, which were obtained in the manner familiar to all, opening forever a perfect Pandora's box of dangerous and unceasing evils to our country; and not the least of these, to the Supreme Court of the United States itself, the supreme and most important invention of the Constitution. For upon it must continuously fall the task of passing upon the unjust attempts of classes to impose unfair burdens.

However that may be, and however serious the burdens that ourselves and our posterity must ever struggle with, however the backs of toilers may stagger under them, the present interest is confined to the fact that we must hereafter consider further proposed encroachments upon the Constitution with the knowledge of the existing factor that it is, until the later Legal Tender decision may happily be departed from, still within established governmental power to play a game of battledoor and shuttlecock with the values of all commodities by legislation creating a depreciating