Page:Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1st ed, 1833, vol III).djvu/245

 CH. XXXIII.] property of the debtor, which he might seize on execution, at an appraisement wholly disproportionate to its known value. Such grievances, and oppressions, and others of a like nature, were the ordinary results of legislation during the revolutionary Avar, and the intermediate period down to the formation of the constitution. They entailed the most enormous evils on the country; and introduced a system of fraud, chicanery, and profligacy, which destroyed all private confidence, and all industry and enterprise.

§ 1366. It is manifest, that all these prohibitory clauses, as to coining money, emitting bills of credit, and tendering any thing, but gold and silver, in payment of debts, are founded upon the same general policy, and result from the same general considerations. The policy is, to provide a fixed and uniform value throughout the United States, by which commercial and other dealings of the citizens, as well as the monied transactions of the government, might be regulated. For it may well be asked, why vest in congress the power to establish a uniform standard of value, if the states might use the same means, and thus defeat the uniformity of the standard, and consequently the standard itself? And why establish a standard at all for the government of the various contracts, which might be entered into, if those contracts might afterwards be discharged by a different standard, or by that, which is not money, under the authority of state tender laws? All these prohibitions are, therefore, entirely homogeneous, and are essential to the establishment of a uniform standard of value in the formation and discharge of contracts. For this reason, as well as others derived from the