all or nearly all of the convention seemed to concur in the sentiment. Contemporaneous acts are certainly evidence of intention, and if so, it is difficult to see what more is needed to show that the members of that convention intended to withhold from the states, and from the United States, all power to make anything but gold and silver a standard of value, or a tender in payment of debts. Equally decisive proof to the same effect is found in the debates which subsequently occurred in the conventions of the several states, to which the constitution, as adopted, was submitted for ratification. Mr. Martin thought that the states ought not to be totally deprived of the right to emit bills of credit, but he says "that the convention was so smitten with the paper money dread that they insisted that the prohibition should be absolute." Currency is a word much more comprehensive than the word money, as it may include bank bills and even bills of exchange as well as coins of gold and silver, but the word money, as employed in the grant of power under consideration, means the coins of gold and silver, fabricated and stamped as required by law, which, by virtue of their intrinsic value, as universally acknowledged, and their official origin, become the medium of exchange and the standard by which all other values are expressed and discharged. Support to the proposition that the word money, as employed in that clause, was intended to be used in the sense here supposed is also derived from the language employed in certain numbers of the Federalist, which, as is well known, were written and published during the period the question whether the states would ratify the constitution was pending in their several conventions. Such men as the writers of those essays never could have employed such language if they had entertained the remotest idea that congress possessed the power to make paper promises a legal tender.