We have forty thousand millions of property in this country, and a wise
self-interest will not permit us to overturn its relations by seeking
for an inferior dollar wherewith to settle the dues and demands of
any creditor. The question might be different from a merely selfish
stand-point if, on paying the dollar to the public creditor, it would
disappear after performing that function. But the trouble is that the
inferior dollar you pay the public creditor remains in circulation, to
the exclusion of the better dollar. That which you pay at home will stay
there; that which you send abroad will come back. The interest of the
public creditor is indissolubly bound up with the interest of the whole
people. Whatever affects him affects us all; and the evil that we might
inflict upon him by paying an inferior dollar would recoil upon us
with a vengeance as manifold as the aggregate wealth of the Republic
transcends the comparatively small limits of our bonded debt. And
remember that our aggregate wealth is always increasing, and our
bonded debt steadily growing less! If paid in a good silver dollar, the
bondholder has nothing to complain of. If paid in an inferior silver
dollar, he has the same grievance that will be uttered still more
plaintively by the holder of the legal-tender note and of the
national-bank bill, by the pensioner, by the day-laborer, and by the
countless host of the poor, whom we have with us always, and on whom
the most distressing effect of inferior money will be ultimately
precipitated.

But I must say, Mr. President, that the specific demand for the payment
of our bonds in gold coin and in nothing else, comes with an ill grace
from certain quarters. European criticism is levelled against us and
hard names are hurled at us across the ocean, for simply daring to state
that the letter of our law declares the bonds to be payable in standard
coin of July 14, 1870; expressly and explicitly declared so, and