Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/175

Rh left no doubt as to his opinion on treasury note acts. He gave a qualified approval in the "proviso, that they were not issued in greater amount than would meet the actual necessities of a circulating medium."

Having arrived at this, the first substantive act of President Houston in the management of the financial affairs of the Republic of Texas, if seems fitting to state, somewhat succinctly, his opinions on these matters,—opinions from which he at no time, then or afterward, swerved.

General Houston was emphatically, in the language of the day, a hard-money Democrat. He held sternly, that a public debt is a public evil. In his opinion, no money is a safe currency except metallic money, gold and silver. A currency not directly redeem.able in coin of its own nature, leads to contracting public debt, and to the unrestrained increase of public debt. Facility in the issuance of paper currency leads to mismanagement, to reckless expenditures, to dishonesty, peculation, and embezzlement in the administration of public affairs. An administration of Government finances based on a system of paper currency, produces oppressive taxation of the people, is calculated to make the few who are rich, richer, and the many in moderate circumstances, poorer; it saps public and private morals; it impairs respect for honesty in private life as well as for law and order. Banks of issue Houston regarded with more than distrust, and he looked on public loan acts with wary doubt. When public necessity compels a resort to paper currency, it should be done as sparingly as possible, and a return to metallic money should be made as speedily as possible. Paper should be the handmaid to gold and silver, always subordinated to these metals, and redeemable in them as promptly and as directly as can be done. Himself a patriot, he did not disbelieve in patriotism; but his ideas were not Utopian. He looked on human nature as it is, as it has ever shown itself to be. To his principles and opinions, as just stated in general outline, Houston, in the difficult circumstances of his two administrations, and on all occasions, was true.

It seems fitting here to make formal record of a declaration made in the latter days of the Republic more than once to Ashbel Smith. He declared that the financial management and control of the treasury in its principles and general action during both his administrations were affirmatively his own. He said that this was emphatically true of the exchequers of his second administration, and that he was the author of the plan. This should not, however, lead us to underrate the value of the counsels and co-operation of his Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Smith. Let us return to the treasury notes, the star money of 1837. The issue of them