all Europe—an attempt or treasonable promise to thwart the wellknown national will on a great question of policy affecting the whole American continent now and in the long future—a full proof, if any such were needed, of the want of intelligence on the part of the Administration, and of its want of needful moral stamina for the proper discharge of the duties of the Executive Department of the Government.

Currency and Legal Tender.

"Ours was intended to be a hard-money government." So said an eminent expounder of the Constitution, and history confirms what he said. The original draft of the Constitution, like the Articles of Confederation, gave Congress power "to emit bills of credit," which, as interpreted by history and the Supreme Court, was power to create a paper-money currency based on the credit of the Government. After mature deliberation and elaborate discussion, the Convention struck out the power by a vote of nine to two. The only analogous power granted was that to coin money and regulate the value of foreign coin. This far inferior power was not left to be inferred as a necessary incident to the great comprehensive power to regulate commerce, and of course the so much larger, more important power to make paper-money currency cannot be inferred as an incident to that or any other granted power, even if the action of the Convention did not disprove any such intention.

When Congress has regulated the value of coin, the law of the contract gives an all-sufficient tender law, and there is little or no need for any other to secure or regulate the right of tender. The power in no form is given to Congress, not even to make coin a legal tender. It is inferable, from the prohibition upon the States "to make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts," that part of the power, all that could possibly be needed for any proper purpose, was intentionally left with the States, where nearly the whole subject of contracts was left, and where this, like all else pertaining to contracts, appropriately belonged. To infer a concurrent power in Congress on such a subject would mar the symmetry of the Constitution, the special purpose of its framers having been to eliminate everything like

collision or conflict of power between the Federal and State Governments.

If the power to make paper money were conceded, and the making of it a legal tender were necessary to its better circulation, still it would have to be shown that the making of it such was a "proper" incident to the power. This cannot be done. The power to rob citizens or dishonor the nation can never be a proper incident to any power.

No honest man will say that a power to raise forced loans is a proper incident to the power to borrow money. Yet, worse is done when the creditor is forced to take a third or a half in discharge of his whole demand, because the forced loan is accompanied by a government promise, express or implied, to refund, whereas no such promise is given to the robbed creditor. Reduced to its pure elements, it is plain robbery of the private citizen for the fancied benefit of the paper-money experiment, to the injury of the national honor and credit.

Besides, the power to make paper money being itself a merè inferred incident to some granted power, to allow this as an incident to that would be to permit a piling of incident upon incident to the utter destruction of the limitation of power intended by a careful specification of all powers intended to be granted.

According to the inexorable law of trade, the doubling or trebling of a full currency always doubles or trebles prices. This has been the experience of all countries, and to none has it been a more costly experience than our own. It has therefore been a long-settled policy of European governments to meet the pecuniary emergency during war by sale of government bonds at any reasonable discount rather than by an inflation of the currency. That discount is only one loss, whereas trebling the cost of government supplies causes much larger loss in the first instance, and it is a loss which is repeated from year to year for every year the war lasts. The inflation policy more than doubles or trebles the needful cost of the war.

Borrowing being the only means for carrying on the war, the necessity for keeping up the value of government bonds should have occurred to every one presuming to control the national finances. To that end a market for them in Europe should have been sought. Instead of this or any other rational effort to keep

up the value of the bonds, the most efficacious means were used for putting it down by resort to an inflated, depreciated currency. The excuse for this, according to newspaper discussion, was that an excess of depreciated currency was necessary, as they express it, “to float the loan." It is very strange that there should not have been at the head of our finances that modicum of sagacity necessary to knowing that a thing which is itself constantly sinking should not be relied on to float anything else.

The sinking of the currency has so sunk the bonds and the national credit that it is much to be feared that a loan in Europe is no longer practicable. Instead of doing anything to extricate us from this unfortunate condition by a reduction of the currency, the empirics are seeking to increase the mischief by a further inflation, through a swarm of new banks of issue. This is done in disregard of the abundant experience of this country and France during their respective revolutions, and of the present experience of the Southern States, that, after a certain point of depreciation in the currency, its holders will cease to fund in Government bonds, preferring the chance of shifting off the currency to that of profitably using the bonds after Government credit as to both is destroyed.

It seems to be conceded now by even the Administration press, or at least by the more intelligent and respectable part, that the enormous extra prices which the people have to pay for all the necessaries and comforts of life, over the necessary result of depreciation in the currency, is a part, and vastly the largest part, of the tax they have to pay toward supporting the war. This too though the Government gets no benefit whatever from that tax. It is a penalty the people are made to pay for a financial blunder. To those who depend on fixed incomes or wages the inflation of the currency causes an indirect tax to the full amount of the depreciation, which is much heavier than would be an income tax of thirty per cent.

This specimen of abolition skill in financiering may be compared to that notable financial discovery made by President Lincoln, and with which he enlightened the world in a message to Congress, when he said: "Certainly it is not so easy to pay something as it is to pay nothing; but it is easier to pay a large sum than it is to pay a larger one. And it is easier to pay any

sum when we are able, than it is before we are able." This brilliant financial discovery, if it does not enlarge our national renown for wisdom, ought at least to warn the nation against ever again installing a bad joke in the Presidency. In all ways Mr. Lincoln assuredly has proved himself to be a very costly as well as a very bad joke.

The Negro Question.

1. Our Government was founded by white men for white people. It was in the contemplation of no one that we should ever be debased into a mulatto nation. Nothing was done by legislation or otherwise to remove the strong natural repugnance of race between whites and blacks, but everything to increase the prejudice and maintain the white supremacy. Intermarriage between the races was prohibited; the blacks were refused all political or social equality, all right of suffrage, or to hold office, even the privilege of testifying against the whites; most of the States prohibited free blacks from emigrating to or settling in them.

2. The black population is a moral, social, and political evil to the States in which it is located; but the evil is confined to those States. Slaveholding may be a sin, though it is countenanced by the example of all nations, ancient or modern, civilized or uncivilized, Christian or pagan; but it is a sin for which they who practice it are alone responsible, none of it attaching to the free States, who have no rightful control over the subject.

For the evil and the sin we have to thank the cupidity of England and that of those among our own countrymen, who carried on the African slave-trade prior to the adoption of the Federal Constitution; and for the twenty years that the trade was kept open thereafter, we are indebted to the cupidity of certain New England and extreme Southern States, who trafficked their votes with each other, and combined to keep open the trade despite the earnest remonstrance of Maryland and Virginia. As said by President Lincoln, "the people of the South are not more responsible for the original introduction of this property than are the people of the North."

While the evils from negro slavery have been felt exclusively by the States in which it is located, the large commercial benefits from slave labor have been diffused all over the nation. Slave

labor furnishing, as it has, two hundred millions of annual exports from the South, has been the principal nutriment of our immense national commerce. To the North it has been an unmixed benefit, giving her at the South the most commodious and bountiful market of the world for the products of Northern capital and industry.

3. The true policy in reference to our negro population is to be found in the separation, not the amalgamation of the two races. So have thought all our more eminent statesmen who have carefully considered the subject, including such names as Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Clay, and Webster. Jefferson said: "Nothing is more clearly written in the book of destiny than the emancipation of the blacks; and it is equally certain that the two races will never live in a state of equal freedom under the same government, so insurmountable are the barriers which nature, habit, and opinions have established between them.”

No public man has ever more fully or frequently than President Lincoln committed himself in favor of the policy of separation. He earnestly recommended to Congress a scheme for gradual compensated emancipation and colonization. He never seemingly abandoned the policy until, from want of manhood, he truckled to the threatened dictation of the traitor cabal of fanatic governors. He tried to escape the disgrace of his submission by anticipating them, and hence his disastrous abolition proclamation, which either unmasked his previous hypocrisy or proved him to be the weak, if unwilling, tool of ruthless fanaticism. Since then vengeance against the South has been his main object, reckless of the interests of both races, using the blacks only as a means for vengeance, regardless of what they may suffer in its accomplishment; this vengeance, too, being for supposed hate of himself, induced by his own acts.

4. The incitement contained in that proclamation to a servile war of knife and torch is denounced as contrary to the usages of civilized warfare by our Declaration of Independence, and also by the diplomatic correspondence of John Quincy Adams under the Presidency of Monroe. In the latter, it is said, in reference to the pretended right to emancipate the slaves of an enemy by proclamation: "The right of putting to death all prisoners in cold blood and without special cause, might as well be pretended

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