It is scarcely needful to add, that the Supreme Court of the United States suffered in the judgment of good citizens by that transaction; that the best legal and financial opinion of the country yielded little respect to a decision _thus secured_; and that intelligent people do not believe that constitutional law _can_ sanction what contravenes at once common sense and common morality. Judge Field (and his memory the country will not willingly let die), one of the majority in the first decision, and writing the opinion of the dissenting minority in the second, used this strong but just language, "_It follows, then, logically, from the doctrine advanced by the majority of the Court as to the power of Congress over the subject of legal tender, that Congress may borrow gold coin upon a pledge to repay gold at the maturity of its obligations, and yet in direct disregard of its pledge, in open violation of faith, may compel the lender to take, in place of the gold stipulated, its own promises; and that legislation of this character would not be in violation of the Constitution, but in harmony with its letter and spirit. What is this but declaring that repudiation by the Government of the United States of its solemn obligations would be Constitutional?_" FOOTNOTES: [7] John Jay Knox's United States Notes. [8] Practical Political Economy, 1877, p. 452. CHAPTER V. MONEY. The subject of Money presents few difficulties, or rather none of any depth, to one who has thoroughly mastered the subject of Value. To all others the difficulties are insuperable. Essay after essay and volume after volume has been written in this country upon Money, by men who would have become good economists and good monetaries, if they had only begun their inquiries at the right place and followed them in the right direction. As we saw in the last chapter that it is impossible for anybody to understand the subject of Credit without first comprehending the matter of Value, so we shall see in this chapter that in the order of Nature Value precedes Money, and that the latter can only be learned in the light of the former. The logical reason for this in general is, that Money itself is always a Valuable, and comes to its function as money only through a comparison of itself with other Valuables. The thin difficulties that confront the student of Money, who has reached the topic along the proper highway cast up for economical inquiries, arise apparently from two sources; and we will begin our present discussion by first looking at these in their order.