tice Jackson, who was appointed by President
Harrison on my own earnest recommendation. There has never
been made in any quarter, so far as I know, a statement or
pretence that there existed any evidence that President Grant
made these appointments, or that any member of his Cabinet
advised it because of its possible effect on the Legal Tender
Law. Yet this foolish and dirty charge has found extensive
credit. I read it once in the London _Times._ It was, however,
in a communication written by a degenerate and recreant American
who was engaged in reviling his own country. It was also
referred to by Mr. Bryan in his book on the United States.
I sent him a copy of a pamphlet I prepared on the subject,
and received from him a letter expressing his satisfaction
that the story was without foundation. 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.

CHAPTER XX
ADIN THAYER

The political history of Massachusetts from 1850 until 1888
cannot be written or understood without a knowledge of the
remarkable career of Adin Thayer. When I was first nominated
f