xisting the treasury order has been, and now is productive of
great distress. It acts upon a state of things which gives extraordinary
force to its stroke, and extraordinary point to its sting. It arrests
specie, when the free use and circulation of specie are most important;
it cripples the banks, at a moment when the banks more than ever need
all their means. It makes the merchant unable to remit, when remittance
is necessary for his own credit, and for the general adjustment of
commercial balances. I am not now discussing the general question,
whether prices must not come down, and adjust themselves anew to the
amount of bullion existing in Europe and America. I am dealing only with
the measures of our own government on the subject of the currency, and I
insist that these measures have been most unfortunate, and most ruinous
in their effects on the ordinary means of our circulation at home, and
on our ability of remittance abroad.

Their effects, too, on domestic exchanges, by deranging and misplacing
the specie which is in the country, are most disastrous. Let him who has
lent an ear to all these promises of a more uniform currency see how he
can now sell his draft on New Orleans or Mobile. Let the Northern
manufacturers and mechanics, those who have sold the products of their
labor to the South, and heretofore realized the prices with little loss
of exchange,--let them try present facilities. Let them see what reform
of the currency has done for them. Let them inquire whether, in this
respect, their condition is better or worse than it was five or six
years ago.

Gentlemen, I hold this disturbance of the measure of value, and the
means of payment and exchange, this derangement, and, if I may so say,
this violation of the currency, to be one of the most unpardonable of
political faults. He who tampers with the currency robs labor of its
bread. He panders, indeed, to greedy capital, which is keen-sighted, and
may shift for itself; but he beggars labor, which is honest,
unsuspecting, and too busy with the present to calculate for the future.
The prosperity of the working classes lives, moves, and has its being in
established credit, and a steady medium of payment. All sudden changes
destroy it. Honest industry never comes in for any part of the spoils in
that scramble which takes place when the currency of a country is
disordered. Did wild schemes and projects ever benefit the industrious?
Did irredeemable bank paper