it to Parliament for their advice and consent. Now the very reverse is
the case here, not only with regard to the principle, but the forms
prescribed by the Constitution. The principle certainly assigns to the
only body constituted by the Constitution (the legislative body) the
power to make laws, and the forms even direct that the enactment should
be ascribed to them. The Senate, in relation to revenue bills, have the
right to propose amendments, and so has the Executive by the power
given him to return them to the House of Representatives with his
objections. It is in his power also to propose amendments in the
existing revenue laws, suggested by his observations upon their
defective or injurious operation. But the delicate duty of devising
schemes of revenue should be left where the Constitution has placed it
- with the immediate representatives of the people. For similar reasons
the mode of keeping the public treasure should be prescribed by them,
and the further removed it may be from the control of the Executive the
more wholesome the arrangement and the more in accordance with
republican principle.

Connected with this subject is the character of the currency. The idea
of making it exclusively metallic, however well intended, appears to me
to be fraught with more fatal consequences than any other scheme having
no relation to the personal rights of the citizens that has ever been
devised. If any single scheme could produce the effect of arresting at
once that mutation of condition by which thousands of our most indigent
fellow-citizens by their industry and enterprise are raised to the
possession of wealth, that is the one. If there is one measure better
calculated than another to produce that state of things so much
deprecated by all true republicans, by which the rich are daily adding
to their hoards and the poor sinking deeper into penury, it is an
exclusive metallic currency. Or if there is a process by which the