Congress has evidently just as much right to _increase_ the value of the dollar, after a contract has been made, as it has to _reduce_ its value. It has, therefore, just as much right to cheat debtors, by compelling them to pay _more_ than they agreed to pay, as it has to cheat creditors, by compelling them to accept _less_ than they agreed to accept. All this talk of the court is equivalent to asserting that congress has the right to alter men's contracts at pleasure, _after they are made_, and make them over into something, or anything, wholly different from what the parties themselves had made them. And this is equivalent to denying all men's right to make their own contracts, or to acquire any contract rights, which congress may not _afterward_, at pleasure, alter, or abolish. It is equivalent to saying that the words of contracts are not to be taken in the sense in which they are used, by the parties themselves, at the time when the contracts are entered into, but only in such different senses as congress may choose to put upon them at any future time. If this is not asserting the right of congress to abolish altogether men's natural right to make their own contracts, what is it? Incredible as such audacious villainy may seem to those unsophisticated persons, who imagine that a court of law should be a court of justice, it is nevertheless true, that this court intended to declare the unlimited power of congress to alter, at pleasure, the contracts of parties, _after they have been made_, by altering the kind and amount of money by which the contracts may be fulfilled. That they intended all this, is proved, not only by the extracts already given from their opinions, but also by the whole tenor of their arguments--too long to be repeated here--and more explicitly by these quotations, _viz._: There is no well-founded distinction to be made between the constitutional validity of an act of congress declaring treasury notes a legal tender for the payment of debts contracted after its passage, and that of an act making them a legal tender for the discharge of _all_ debts, _as well those incurred before, as those made after, its enactment_.--_Legal Tender Cases_, 12 _Wallace_ 530 (1870). Every contract for the payment of money, simply, is necessarily subject to the constitutional power of the government over the currency, whatever that power may be, _and the obligation of the parties is, therefore, assumed with reference to that power_.--12 _Wallace_ 549. Contracts for the payment of money are subject to the authority of congress, _at least so far as relates to the means of payment_.--12 _Wallace_ 549.