ionist_, in the usual and accepted sense of that
word. I am for a solid specie basis for our circulation, and for specie
as a part of the circulation, so far as it may be practicable and
convenient. I am for giving no value to paper, merely as paper. I abhor
paper; that is to say, irredeemable paper, paper that may not be
converted into gold or silver at the will of the holder. But while I
hold to all this, I believe, also, that an exclusive gold and silver
circulation is an utter impossibility in the present state of this
country and of the world. We shall none of us ever see it; and it is
credulity and folly, in my opinion, to act under any such hope or
expectation. The States will make banks, and these will issue paper; and
the longer the government of the United States neglects its duty in
regard to measures for regulating the currency, the greater will be the
amount of bank paper overspreading the country. Of this I entertain not
a particle of doubt.

While I thus hold to the absolute and indispensable necessity of gold
and silver, as the foundation of our circulation, I yet think nothing
more absurd and preposterous, than unnatural and strained efforts to
import specie. There is but so much specie in the world, and its amount
cannot be greatly or suddenly increased. Indeed, there are reasons for
supposing that its amount has recently diminished, by the quantity used
in manufactures, and by the diminished products of the mines. The
existing amount of specie, however, must support the paper circulations,
and the systems of currency, not of the United States only, but of other
nations also. One of its great uses is to pass from country to country,
for the purpose of settling occasional balances in commercial
transactions. It always finds its way, naturally and easily, to places
where it is needed for these uses. But to take extraordinary pains to
bring it where the course of trade does not bring it, where the state of
debt and credit does not require it to be, and then to endeavor, by
unnecessary and injurious regulations, treasury orders, accumulations at
the mint, and other contrivances, there to retain it, is a course of
policy bordering, as it appears to me, on political insanity. It is
boasted that we have seventy-five or eighty millions of specie now in
the country. But what more senseless, what more absurd, than this boast,
if there is a balance against us abroad, of which payment is desired
sooner than remitt