Future Paper Money of This Country [pp. 1-25]

FUTURE PAPER MONEY OFE THIS COUNTRY.
present national banks secured by national stocks; 2. That it
is the national will steadily to reduce and speedily extinguish
the public debt, so that the very basis and possibility of such
a currency will steadily be passing away; 3. The question What
is the best circulating medium to supply the vacuum? is more
concrete than abstract; not merely what is ideally the best, if
the people could be persuaded to adopt it, but what is the best
that, with their predilections, traditions, and prejudices, they
can probably be induced to adopt.
The practical alternatives are national Treasury legal-ten der notes; national-bank notes secured as best they may be by
other means than United States stocks; the system of State bank circulation; the currency provided by some great overshadowing national bank and its branches, concurrently with
the circulating notes of State banks, which prevailed through
most of the first half-century of our national history.
Some say, indeed, the State is under no obligation to protect the people against issues of worthless money, and that the
principle of caveat emptor applies here as well as elsewhere. Bank
bills, however, circulate as money only in virtue of being issued
by public institutions founded and authorized by government.
It is the duty of government to make the best practicable provision that what thus is made current as money by its own
virtual imprimatur, be good for its face, whether paper or
coin, and to suppress all counterfeit, unsound, and fraudulent
issues. These operate as a fraud upon innocent holders. They
destroy the very standards of value and instruments of honorable trade. If the State abdicates this function, there will be
no end of schemes and institutions for creating property, or
rather filching it from the people, by issuing engraved paper
dollars worth less than the paper on which they are inscribed,
in exchange for it. Conscience and the Bible alike pronounce
"a false balance an abomination to the Lord." Spurious money
is the worst form of this sort of imposture.
It will be convenient to treat of the different kinds of paper
money which may take the place of the national-bank notes
now secured by the deposit of government stocks in the national Treasury, in the event of these being retired by the payment of the national debt or otherwise, in an order the reverse
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