Page:Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1st ed, 1833, vol III).djvu/145

 CH. XXV.] states; and to those of raising and maintaining fleets and armies. To the two former, the relation may be said to be immediate. And, in the last place, it will be argued, that it is clearly within the provision, which authorizes the making of all needful rules and regulations concerning the property of the United States, as the same has been practised upon by the government.

"A bank relates to the collection of taxes in two ways. Indirectly, by increasing the quantity of circulating medium, and quickening circulation, which facilitates the means of paying; directly, by creating a convenient species of medium, in which they are to be paid. To designate or appoint the money or thing, in which taxes are to be paid, is not only a proper, but a necessary, exercise of the power of collecting them. Accordingly, congress, in the law concerning the collection of the duties on imposts and tonnage, have provided, that they shall be payable in gold and silver. But while it was an indispensable part of the work to say in what they should be paid, the choice of the specific thing was mere matter of discretion. The payment might have been required in the commodities themselves. Taxes in kind, however ill-judged, are not without precedents even in the United States; or it might have been in the paper money of the several states, or in the bills of the bank of North-America, New-York, and Massachusetts, all or either of them; or it might have been in bills issued under the authority of the United States. No part of this can, it is presumed, be disputed. The appointment, then, of the money or thing, in which the cases are to be paid, is an incident to the power of collection. And among the expedients, which may be adopted, is that of bills issued under the authority of the United States. Now the manner of issuing these bills is again matter of discretion. The government might, doubtless, proceed in the following manner: It might provide that they should be issued under the direction of certain officers, payable on demand; and in order to support their credit, and give them a ready circulation, it might, besides giving them a currency in its taxes, set apart, out of any monies in its treasury a given sum, and appropriate it, under the direction of those officers, as a fund for answering the bills, as presented for payment.

"The constitutionality of all this would not admit of a question, and yet it would amount to the institution of a bank, with a view to the more convenient collection of taxes. For the simplest and most precise idea of a bank is, a deposit of coin or other property, as a fund for circulating a credit upon it, which is to answer the purpose of money. That such an arrangement would be equivalent to the establishment of a bank, of this proposition, or what were the reasons for refusing it, cannot now be ascertained by any authentic document, or even by any accurate recollection of the 18