individual
convenience--an object always to be considered where it does not
conflict with the principles of our Government or the general welfare
of the country. If such notes only were received, and always under
circumstances allowing their early presentation for payment, and if at
short and fixed periods they were converted into specie to be kept by
the officers of the Treasury, some of the most serious obstacles to
their reception would perhaps be removed. To retain the notes in the
Treasury would be to renew under another form the loans of public money
to the banks, and the evils consequent thereon.

It is, however, a mistaken impression that any large amount of specie
is required for public payments. Of the seventy or eighty millions
now estimated to be in the country, ten millions would be abundantly
sufficient for that purpose provided an accumulation of a large amount
of revenue beyond the necessary wants of the Government be hereafter
prevented. If to these considerations be added the facilities which will
arise from enabling the Treasury to satisfy the public creditors by its
drafts or notes receivable in payment of the public dues, it may be
safely assumed that no motive of convenience to the citizen requires
the reception of bank paper.

To say that the refusal of paper money by the Government introduces an
unjust discrimination between the currency received by it and that used
by individuals in their ordinary affairs is, in my judgment, to view it
in a very erroneous light. The Constitution prohibits the States from
making anything but gold and silver a tender in the payment of debts,
and thus secures to every citizen a right to demand payment in the legal
currency. To provide by law that the Government will only receive its
dues in gold and silver is not to confer on it any peculiar privilege,
but merely to place it on an equality with the citizen by reserving to
it a right secured to him by the Constitution. It is doubtless for this
reason that the principle has been sanctioned by successive laws from
the time of the first Congress under the Constitution down to the last.
Such precedents, never objected to and proceeding from such sources,
afford a decisive answer to the imputation of inequality or injustice.

But in fact the measure is one of restriction, not of favor. To forbid
the public agent to receive in payment any other than a certain kind of
money is to refuse him a discretion possessed by eve