especially in the higher stages of civilization, where the importance of commerce, of the credit-system, and of money-economy as contradistinguished from barter-economy is so great; producing there a state of uncertainty which is otherwise peculiar only to barbarous medieval times.(937) All this discourages the best business men and the best husbandmen more than it does any other class of people, and demoralizes the whole economy of a nation; and demoralizes it the more in proportion as it is easier for the state to influence the value of paper money as compared with specie, and as its influence is more irresistible.(938) The compulsory circulation of paper money is a much more powerful and yet a much more simple screw by means of which to practice extortion than is the most burdensome taxation or forced loan, and at the same time the most comprehensive power which a government can possess to carry out both these measures. (_Ad. Wagner._) All the horrors of the later Roman republic, the draining of the provinces by robber-governors with their publicans and sinners, the building up of monstrous fortunes without any production proper, but through usury and rapine alone: all this is made to revive again through the instrumentality of the national-economic disease called a paper crisis, in a less violent form, indeed, but in one which is much more insidious and scarcely less pernicious. Section V. Resumption Of Specie Payments. The healing of such a paper-money disease as we have described, it has been endeavored to effect in three ways more particularly.