to at
least sixty per cent. below specie. At the last rate, if our yearly
expenditures, paid in paper, reached $700,000,000, this would command
but $280,000,000 in gold, thus subjecting the Government to a loss of
$420,000,000 per annum, and at thirty-two per cent. discount,
$224,000,000 per annum. These notes, it is true, bear no interest, which
at six per cent. on $280,000,000, would save $16,800,000 a year. But as
under the Secretary's plan (hereafter developed) the Government would
only pay an annual interest of four per cent. on this loan, the saving
would only be $11,200,000. Deduct this interest thus saved from the
$420,000,000 of increased annual expenditures, arising from such
depreciation of treasury notes, and the result is a net loss of
$408,800,000 per annum to the Government, from the use of such redundant
and depreciated currency. Surely, such a system would soon terminate in
bankruptcy and repudiation, repeating the history of French assignats
and Continental money.

Nor is it the Government only that suffers from such a disaster, but the
ruin extends to the people. There is no law more clearly established
than this: that the currency of a country bears a certain fixed
proportion to its wealth and business. If we expand the currency beyond
this proportion, we violate this law, and will surely suffer the
terrible penalties of this disobedience. This law is so certain and
invariable, that, if the expansion beyond this proportion should be even
in specie, the result would still be disastrous.

This was illustrated during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, when
Spain, having opened the virgin mines of America, brought the precious
metals in countless millions within her limits, and restricted their
exportation by the most stringent penalties. And what was the
consequence? Mr. Prescott, of Boston, tells us in his great history,
that 'the streams of wealth, which flowed in from the silver quarries of
Zacatecas and Potosi were jealously locked up within the limits of the
Peninsula.' 'The golden tide, which, permitted a free vent, would have
fertilized the region through which it poured, now buried the land under
a deluge, which blighted every green and living thing. _Agriculture_,
_commerce_, MANUFACTURES, every branch of national industry and
improvement, languished and fell to decay; and the nation, like the
Phrygian monarch who turned all that he touched into gold, cursed by the
very consummation of its