days-that banks should be allowed to issue all the currency they choose, provided they are held rigidly to specie redemption; and if you cannot catch them in their iniquitous practice, by presenting more than they can redeem, you, or the public at large, have no reason to complain. I maintain that this is as great a heresy in financial economy as the other is in ethics. The matter of detection is not necessary to fasten the moral guilt of the crime in either of the above cases. Each of these cases demand alike that men should cease to do evil. No reliance should be placed upon the chance that the evil act will never be exposed to society. And, to apply the argument to the issues of currency, these issues should never exceed the specie constantly kept on hand for their redemption. This is the only touchstone by which to try bank issues. The nominal redemption of banks and pretended specie payments, when they do not hold ten per cent. of their liabilities in coin, is all moonshine. Such issues work the evil in the country, whether you detect it or not. The currency of the country is like electricity it permeates and governs the exchangeable values of all forms of wealth.

If merchants, and dealers in bank, insisted that bank loans should be made only in real cash, instead of bank notes and credits in bank, how different would the result be. A financial panic could never be known in the country. Now any considerable derangement in the commercial or mercantile world produces a money panic, and this comes on, too, at the very moment when the monetary power is most needed to sustain the country. Thus under our boasted American banking system, at the very time money is needed most, it is the most difficult, nay I might say impossible, to obtain it. The volume of currency which is necessary to be continued, to save the great interests of the nation from almost total destruction, is so much reduced that failures follow inevitably.

Every dollar of currency which the banks contract makes ten dollars of bankruptcy and insolvency in the community. So fatal is this system of making fictitious money, that its evils are only disclosed when panic and terror seize upon the minds of men, and they find that

they have been lured into the error of promising to pay dollars for property which has been valued and measured by false standards; and to meet these promises will more than absorb their whole possessions. It is the province and effect of paper money to create prices without corresponding values. Hence every one is more or less-injured by it. From its insidious action no person can escape, if he lives where the abomination is tolerated. If a robber meets me on the public road, in open day, and takes from me one-half of my gold, he does me the same injury as the banker, who, by a dash of the pen in the bank parlor, deprives me of one-half the value of my money. There is, however, this difference, that if I happen to be armed, I may effectually resist the attack of the highwayman, and save my money; but against the action of the bank president I have no recourse. His agency is like electricity, pervading all substances, and so subtile that locks, bars, and fastenings cannot exclude its influence. I may lock up my gold, and keep it under the closest custody; but so long as I am liable, through the action of bank alchemy, to lose half its value, I might as well lose half its quantity.

Another of the abominations of paper money is, that avery one must receive it, and pay it, and use it as money, if he lives in a country where such a system of injustice is recognized by legislative enactments.

Wherever this monstrous fraud has gained the ascendency among the people, it becomes absolute, and crushes everything before it. No man can do business in a community, or in a country, unless he gives and takes such form of currency as others give and take in that community. No man can say in such a country, I will receive nothing but gold and silver, and I will pay nothing but gold and silver. Such form of self-proscription would ruin any man. If he adopted any such exclusive rule, no one would deal with him. Hence, right or wrong, the tyranny of paper money is completely absolute. If any man urged conscientious scruples on the subject, he would be ridiculed, or looked on as an ignorant zealot, seeking to reform society upon a point on which they are most determinately incorrigible.

But, notwithstanding all this perverseness on the sub

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ject, the fact is still patent, when tried by Revelation, that all substitutes for money which do not represent real cash in possession, are false measures of value, and are subject to the most decided condemnation, both by reason and a right interpretation of Scripture. The reader will understand me that, in excluding all substitutes for money, I do in no wise condemn any and all sorts of barter and exchanges of all kinds of goods, wares, and merchandise, to any extent which men may carry them. All such barter is honest, legitimate, and right; sanctioned by Divine and human law. But anything which deprives gold and silver of their value, or a large share of their value, except gold and silver themselves, works the same fraud and injury in the body politic which would be wrought by doing business with false weights and measures of quantities and capacities. From this the corollary is inevitable, that paper money in circulation, which does not represent legal coin, works the same injury to the public as counterfeit coin.

The whole volume of business which is wrought in any country, nation, or community, is subject to all the changes, chances, vicissitudes, and failures to which the currency of such nation is subject. Hence the absolute necessity of keeping the currency of a nation such that bankruptcy can never be introduced into it. And this can never be done except by making it gold and silver entirely. For real dollars are made of gold and silver only, with the legitimate alloy. But "promise to pay" dollars are made with the banker's pen and printing presses, and do, most essentially, lessen the value of real dollars, and are obnoxious to the sound logic of the American Constitution and the Christian's Bible. Does the Christian banker know that in issuing bank notes, or extending inscriptions of credit on the bank ledger, anything further than he has in actual possession-the hard dollars in gold or silver to meet the issue of such bank notes, or to take up the checks which may be drawn against such credit in bank— he is committing, in effect, the exact crime which the counterfeiter commits in making spurious coin? For the making of such coin, the counterfeiter is held to be a felon in the eyes of the law, and, on conviction, must serve out his time in the Penitentiary. This, under the United

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States laws. But under the State laws, the counterfeiting of the State Bank issues is deemed a felony, and is liable to an equally severe penalty. Now, the effect of issuing and circulating counterfeit bills is the same upon the banks, provided such trash can get circulation, as the counterfeiting of the national coin has upon the sterling issues of the mint.

The evil of tampering with the currency is a grievance which interests every member of the body politic. To establish a pure currency, it must be made so efficiently. The moment any body of men have the privilege of making the medium of exchange for the country, by securing it on State stocks, mortgages, or any species or property security other than gold and silver, to them is delegated a power to commit infinite mischief. It will not do to convert any form of debt or property, save gold and silver, into currency; because, the moment this is done, gold and silver are shorn of a large fraction of their values. There is no way to keep their values as the Constitution contemplates, and as the Bible commands, but to exclude everything else except the precious metals, from being used as standards of value. All abominations of measuring by false standards must be cast aside, and the business of the whole country done by the righteous measures which a just and beneficent Providence has given to the American people-gold and silver. Whatever trade or exchange cannot be effected with these, in the nation, let it be done on the primitive and simple principle of barter, and bills of exchange from one part of the Union on another. Any affairs which cannot be done by these means, should be left undone till we augment enough of the national coin to transact them, without reducing the value of that coin by swelling the volume of currency with substitutes. Paper money, however, which is issued upon an actual deposit of gold coin in the hands of faithful custodians, or in the Treasury of the United States, and only issued dollar for dollar on such deposit, may be a great auxiliary to the business of the country.

We would not be among the number of those who "do evil that good may come;" who hold to the principle that the end justifies the means. Let us do right, when we know clearly what is such, and leave to a beneficent

Providence to show us that, if we persevere in the right, He will over-rule all things for our real, permanent good. But if we know the right, and persevere in the wrong, with the obstinate perversity that although we know our own acts are wrong to-day, yet we conceive good may come of our doing evil at some distant day, we are then " doing evil that good may come," and we are obnoxious to the fearful denunciation of the Apostle Paul, who says of such, that "their damnation is just." (See Rom. iii, 8.) If to do justly, to act equitably, to measure honestly, to conform to the moral law given by God himself on Mount Sinai, to respect the Christian charge "to do to others as we would they should do to us," to live honestly with all men, to contend for righteousness and against extortion and iniquity-if these are acts of morality and Christian duty, then should the whole united phalanx of the Church militant on earth combine, to put down this nefarious abomination of false currency. With such opposition on the part of Christians, the leprosy which has so long tainted our people, and brought upon them such indescribable evils, would soon be banished from the body politic, and a healthful reform would be the happy result.

Whenever the people can understand that it is a Christian duty to oppose all issues of false currency, the days of this abomination will be numbered. The sin of idolatry, in the Scriptures of the Old Testament, is condemned in the most unmistakable language; while the New Testament discloses to us that covetousness is idolatry, and passes upon the sin in equal terms of severity. This sin, covetousness, is the parent of the abomination-false money, which brings it into being first, and then cherishes it with a parent's tenderness and regard.

An eminent ancient heathen moralist has left upon record a maxim which is often quoted by casuists, and which is worthy of deep reflection: "Quem Deus vult perdere prius dementat." Upon this subject of currency it verily appears that the American people are demented. With gold and silver pouring in upon them in untold quantities, they insist upon continuing the old and nefarious system of bank notes and bank credits, and thus drive all the gold to Europe, where its real value is more