n that end, guard the
sacredness of the public debt and the equal sacredness of the National
pensions, and that to do this effectively it should be provided that
no recognition should ever be made, either by the National Government
or by any State Governments, of debts incurred in aid of the Rebellion.

Still another subject was considered to be of grave consequence.
Preventive measures of the most stringent character were demanded
against a threatened danger to the National credit. With the single
exception of land, which is the basis of all property, the South had
lost the largest aggregate investment held in one form in the entire
country. The money value of Southern slaves, reckoned at current
prices, was larger when the war broke out than the money value of
railroads or of manufacturing establishments in the United States. For
the defense of this great interest the war had been avowedly
undertaken. Perhaps it would be more truthful to say that the
ambitions and conspiring politicians of the South had assumed the
danger to this vast investment as the pretext for destroying the
Government; and they had met with the fate so solemnly foretold in
Sacred Writ,--they had drawn the sword and perished by the sword. As
the one grand consummation of the struggle, the institution of slavery
had disappeared. It was probably, nay, it was certainly to be
expected, that in the destruction of so large an investment great
suffering would come to many who had not participated in the Rebellion;
to many indeed who had opposed it. That remuneration for losses should
be asked was apparently inevitable.

Men of financial skill and experience saw that if such a contingent
liability should overhang the National Treasury the public credit might
be fatally impaired. The acknowledged and imperative indebtedness of
the Government was already enormous; contingencies yet to be
encountered would undoubtedly increase it, and its weight would press
heavily upon the people until a firmly re-established credit should
enable the Government to lower the rate of interest upon its bonds.
So long as the Government was compelled to pay its interest in coin,
while the business of the country was conducted upon the basis of
suspended paper, the burden upon the people would be great. It would
be vastly increased in imagination (and imagination is rapidly
transformed to reality in the tremulous balance which decides the
standard of public credit) if