It is the fashion still, in some quarters, to speak, in spite of the decisions of the Supreme Court and the numerous State courts, to which I have referred, as if it were too clear for argument that Congress had no right to make the Government notes a legal tender.

The gentlemen who talk in that way, however, are almost universally men of letters, or men without any legal training or any considerable legal capacity.

They are of that class of political philosophers who are never trusted by their countrymen to deal with authority with any practical question either legislative, administrative, or judicial.
While saying this, I wish to affirm my own belief that, while it may be in some great emergencies like that of our late Civil War essential to the maintenance of the Government that this power which I believe Congress has, without a shadow of a reasonable question, should be exercised, yet I should hold it a great calamity if it were exercised except on such an occasion.

It is a dangerous power, like the power of suspending the writ of _Habeas corpus,_ or the power of declaring war, or the power of reckless and extravagant public expenditure, never to be exercised if it can possibly be helped.

I think the American people have, in general, settled down on this as the reasonable view, in spite of the clamor of the advocates of fiat money on the one side, and the extreme strict constructionists on the other..