lation was stopped, and men found more and more, that they had better assume; that cæteris paribus, they are almost sure to be best fitted for usefulness and for earning a livelihood in the localities where they have lived for some time and are acquainted with persons and things. Moreover, they learned, that at such places they could live cheaper and better than elsewhere; that, therefore, motives of interest coincided with patriotic impulses, and that the motives for settled life, are both the truest as well as most potent.

It cannot be, that while all rejoice at the opportunities of free populatory movings, which science, higher mechanics, and capital tender to mankind, that at the same time there can be, in the same heads and hearts, a desire to erect barriers to a free interchange of labor, skill, and talent among nations. Steam and telegraph have bridged over rivers and oceans, and railroads, canals, and other artificial highways have made frontiers disappear, and forced even the most reluctant nations to yield more freedom to trade. Why should man, for whose benefit all these creations of genius are made, be alone hemmed in? Nature has still enough of obstacles to an entirely free intercourse. There are still differences of climate and race that are insuperable. They have sometimes been set aside by force, as in the slave trade; but with normal conditions, those that exist will rectify themselves, and the wrong will not be repeated. Had America never imported or received an immigrant, that did not come of his own accord, and for purely economic reasons, and how superior would our society be compared with what it is now! With how much greater hope How much more of the best

we would look into the future. Americanism we would have!

CHAPTER XV.

PAPER MONEY IN AMERICA.

"The effect of money upon human conduct being similar to omnipotence over the Universe, the desire to possess it, must necessarily degenerate into a wild passion, unless restrained by ethics."--Goethe.

IN sitting down to write this chapter, we must first of all confess, that we do it under manifold contradictory feelings. We have before us the notes of the historic data-taken with the view to an understanding of the facts bearing on this subject, and they present such an unbroken series of false, we might well say: wicked-public actions, that they create in us a pre-judgment, that makes us look upon all paper money, that has been, is, or may be issued in America, as the intensification of national, municipal, and corporation dishonesty. But we have beside us also, the latest, and as we think best, enunciations of the socio-political scientists of our age, and they force us to review our opinions, and to reflect again on paper money per se, and then we see, that, amidst all the wrong-doings, there was a seeking after a paper currency, which modern progress justifies. That idea lies in the following from L. von Stein's latest work:—

"There can be, according to all the laws of human development, no doubt, that there will be a time, when metallic money will disappear and mankind will possess only paper money."

This makes us juster to Hamilton's operations in the United States, as well as to their last imitations in Chases' Greenbacks and National Banks. And we perceive, that neither the opponents of all paper money, nor the over-zealous friends of it, pursued fully right; nor totally erroneous courses, because the first were too tenacious of old tenets, and the second too inconsiderate in adopting new opinions.

The very subject of money is full of paradoxes, and we have to be very careful, if we wish to avoid equivocal expressions. Its rightful use is full of benefits to mankind; but the love

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of it, for itself, is a wild passion that always ends in the million fever. The wisest and best society is compatible with large supplies of it; and no less is it true that populations, that have very little of it, are destitute of the higher pecuniary processes in their business relations. The knighterrandry, in the pursuit of riches, is just as much, but no more to be condemned, than the asceticisms, that see virtue only in the absence of money. And so are, in the United States, those no better public guides, who can find in our Constitution no warrant at all for the issue of "bills of credit" by federal authority, than those, who claim that the power is there absolutely without limit. The truth is, that modern society has pecuniary wants, which old ways cannot satisfy, and for which new means have to be provided. To look for these, however, under our constitutions, in one of our governments only, is as preposterous, as the assumption, that the necessary powers are not somewhere. The framers of our fundamental laws did not and could not, in the very nature of things, foresee all future exigencies, but they could and did provide public authorities, who, if they properly co-operated, might secure the best measures by the most proper respective public administrations and lawmaking bodies. Mere jurists or sticklers for positive law could not see this; but it must be plain to all who, beside legal lore, have knowledge of political economy.

The Crown of England and its ministers never did their duty to the colonies on the subject of money. England has, indeed, never been extremely jealous of its royalties, when, not to claim them, made their colonists reckless in their political economics, and therefore more profitable to home traffic. The love of money was, for this reason, never discouraged in America, but permitted to run into its own extravagances through the unrestrained use of paper money, and all kinds of abuses as to domestic or foreign coin. The adoption of the American dollar from superior Spanish mintages, and placing it upon the decimal system of subdivisions as well as multiples, was therefore, on the part of America, an emergence from British negligence; and so must we look upon most, if not all, the creations of paper money. Had England been, all it should have been, to its colonies and, instead of confusion in money, America would early have had pecuniary order.

Massachusetts issued "bills of credit" as legal tenders in 1690 already; the prohibitory clause in the United States Constitution, Art. I., sect. 10, clause 1, derived its verbiage from that first issue of paper money in America. John Law was, about that time, busy with the finances of Scotland, and pro

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posed to the British ministers a paper-money scheme. operations in France followed in 1716. The Bank of Holland, founded in 1609, was well known to, and admired by the Pilgrim Fathers. The Bank of England was chartered in 1694, upon plans drafted by William Paterson, a countryman and acquaintance of Law, and the next year followed the Bank of Scotland. All these schemes rested on the mixture of public, with private credit and capital. The "improvement" (?) of Massachusetts consisted in issuing bills of credit without capital. And the example was catching; and fifty years afterwards every colony had, in one form or another, its paper "surrogate" for money. world was everywhere awakening from its metallic-money stupor, as well as its aversion to a free use of credit, and relaxing its restraints on commerce. The legal profession, the Church, the politicians, the merchants, the scientists, indeed all men, were learning of each other; and this brought not only new economics, but also new laws and ethics. America, considering its social enticements and free pursuit of happiness, with its small capital in moneyed means, did no worse, than Europe did. It rode its hobbies only with slacker reins.

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No amount of losses could daunt the frenzy for "bills of credit" in these early times. In 1705 it took eleven paper pounds to purchase one gold pound sterling. In 1748 England relieved Massachusetts from downright repudiation, by paying it about a million of dollars in gold, and this led to a partial redemption. The payment was for the military expedition against the French Canadian fortress-Louisburg. The obvious lesson of this episode, in colonial history, was not taken to heart by the people; it was: that there are but three ways out of an economic marasmus, caused by a paper money, that has sunk in value, because not based on a specie standard and constant redeemability, to wit: first, as then, an inflow of standard money from the outside; second, partial or total repudiation; and third, the strong arm of a genius like Napoleon, who breaks or bends what will not follow. Communities cannot, of themselves, lift themselves up from a paper-money fall, no more than men can lift themselves up by their own wrist-bands.

The emission of ill-provided, and therefore sure to be a depreciating paper money, during the revolution (1775-83), was rightly considered, not a new makeshift, but an old practice under a new name. It was called "continental money," partly because that was then an undisgraced appellation, but also from an inner intuition, that American money needed to be relieved of local narrowness. And the halo of continentality or, as we would (standing upon similar popular instincts) style

it: "nationalization," was thrown around the new paper money. It ended, in spite of its broad name, in being repudiated; and popular wit coined out of its ruins the phrase: "It is not worth a continental d-" Mr. Franklin used them for a wiser purpose; he spoke of it in his celebrated letter against the redemption of this paper money as "wild taxation." He argued, that the depreciation was a sort of socially, self-collected tax levy, whose distribution was, among such a people as ours, more likely to be just, than the usual systems of taxation. And he held, that to raise the bills to par would be like paying back an already distributed burthen, to unknown contributors, and that those who held the bills then, were certainly not the actual sufferers, for their par value or only to a trifling degree. They were not entitled to full payment. He was certainly right!

Franklin's objections to the raising of an utterly depreciated currency to specie par rests upon the same conceptions of right and wrong, as the actions of Solon and Nehemiah did, in their ancient settlements between debtors and creditors. Solon's Seisachtia took place 594 B.C.; Nehemiah's order to the rich to abate half and more of their claims occurred 404 B.C. They were wise acts, that set equity and social reason above strict nominal justice. Franklin had even a stronger repugnance, than these sages, to all creations of social inequalities by act of government. He had a semi-conscious conviction, that American liberty rested largely on the general quality of possessions, which was then the social condition; and he apprehended, that whenever there would be contrasts between rich and poor, or possessors of wealth and non-possessors, an easily concentrated privileged money-power would have an immense advantage. He wanted to avoid all such conflicts. Transferring 200 millions (the nominal amount of the continental money) from the many to the few, which would have been the effect of a redemption at par, looked to him, like the creation of a moneyed aristocracy. That amount was then a larger sum than 2000 millions are now. The sinking of paper money from par value to nothing, provided it was gradual, he looked upon, as a burthen distributed by a social process, in which, he thought, Americans were sharp enough to escape too severe an individual loss in one lump. We admit the cleverness of such reasoning, and deem it far preferable to the extravagant tenets, as to the sanctity of public credit, which men promulgate who make the creditors' nominal interests the basis of their conceptions. Least entitled to call hard names, such as "repudiators," are always those, who cause the evils, from which repudiation springs. Insolvent and bankrupt laws are, like repudiation, but cures of diseases, that