There are times when such money is unavoidable,
as during war or great public calamity, but it has always been the
anxious care of statesmen to return again to the solid standard of
coin. Therefore it is that specie payments, or a specie standard,
is pressed by the great body of intelligent men who study these
questions, as an indispensable prerequisite for steady business
and good times.

"Now, most of you will agree to all this, and will only differ as
to the mode, or time, and manner; but there is a large class of
people who believe that paper can be, and ought to be, made into
money without any promise or hope of redemption; that a note should
be printed: 'This is a dollar,' and be made a legal tender.

"I regard this as a mild form of lunacy, and have no disposition
to debate with men who indulge in such delusions, which have
prevailed to some extent, at different times, in all countries,
but whose life has been brief, and which have ever shared the fate
of other popular delusions. Congress will never entertain such a
proposition, and, if it should, we know that the scheme would not
stand a moment before the Supreme Court. That court only maintained
the constitutionality of the legal tender promise to pay a dollar
by a divided court, and on the ground that it was issued during
the war, as in the nature of a forced loan, to be redeemed upon
the payment of a real dollar; that is, so many grains of silver or
gold.

"I therefore dismiss such wild theories, and speak only to those
who are willing to assume, as an axiom, that gold and silver, or
coined money, have been proven by all human experience to be the
best possible standards of value, and that paper money is simply
a promise to pay such coined money, and should be made and kept
equal to coined money, by being convertible on demand.

"Now, the question is as to the time and mode by which this may be
brought about, and on this subject no man should be dogmatic, or
stand, without yielding, upon a plan of his own, but should be
willing to give and take, securing the best expedient that public
opinion will allow to be adopted. The purpose and obligation to
bring our paper money to the standard of coin have been over and
over again announced by acts of Congress, and by the platforms of
the great political parties of the country. If resolutions and
promises would bring about specie payments, we would have been
there long ago; but the diversity of opinion as