Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/203

Rh Allen, who think that more and more currency must be issued until the money of the country stays out of the banks; or imagine a Congress manipulated by a ring of unscrupulous and adroit financial sharpers, and such a Congress wielding the tremendous power of changing at pleasure the current value of every dollar and every dollar's worth of property you have—does not your head swim at the prospect? And yet that is the power wielded by any government, intelligent or idiotic, honest or rascally, which is charged with the office of “making and keeping the volume of irredeemable paper money equal to the wants of trade.”

You, my Democratic friends, say that it was not you who conferred such a power upon the Government by the creation of the irredeemable paper money. That is true enough. It was done under the pressure of the extreme necessities of the civil war by Republicans. But does that change the question? Previous to that civil war you would have found among the great statesmen of the Republic scarcely a single one who would have admitted the Constitutionality of an act of Congress making any thing but gold and silver coin a legal tender. I know well that the Supreme Court, after the war, did consider such an act justified by the extremity of National danger. But now the National danger is over. We are at peace. The North and the South have shaken hands in renewed friendship. No foreign enemy threatens our shores. All National danger, with what justification it might afford of exceptional measures, has vanished.

And now you, Democrats of Ohio, propose to continue that awful power of the Government inseparable from an irredeemable paper money system—nay, you propose to perpetuate it,—for what purpose? Not to defend the life of the Republic against armed aggression, but to produce certain effects upon the business of the country.