Daily Ohio Statesman

The New York Freeman's Journal, in an article to show that the finances need reconstruction, makes the following remarks in reference to the plan of getting rid of the interest-bearing debt by paying off the bonds with greenbacks. Says Mr. McMASTER "we must get rid of the debt, but how? In medicine, we have been astonished at the effects of the treatment based on the principle similia similibus curantur. A disease is cured by superinducing, artificially, a like set of symptoms. If an ear is frozen by contact with intensely cold air, cold snow is applied to draw out the frost! If a hand be scalded in very hot water, exposing the part to the dry heat of an open fire is an admirable alleviative. Accept, or not, the medical law, we want to see it applied in finance. We are suffering from too many and too heavy United States bonds-most of them payable, interest and principal, in gold. We want to cure these bonds with greenbacks! That will be, similia similibus curantur-Like by like! That will, in a very short time, pay off the bondholders in their own coin, or in their own rags! Those of us who have never recognized these bonds as a legitimate debt due by the people of the United States will not have much trouble in helping thus, to cure like with like! For others, who, in their innocence, ask if this is not a new way to pay old debts, we have to show that it is simply an old way of paying new debts.

Here are the proofs:

"The widow of an honorable citizen of New York State, her deceased husband's estate having been settled up in 1859, found herself in possession of about twenty thousand dollars. She wished to invest it safely, as a fund from which to educate her fatherless children. Friends assured her she had better invest in the New York State bonds She did so, and, her nearest friends living in Canada, she went thither with her children. So long as these bonds paid interest in gold, she did very well. But when the glorious United States Government-Lincoln, Seward, Chase, and their Congress-made greenbacks a legal tender, this poor woman was overwhelmed. When it got so bad that it took two and a half greenback dollars to make one Canadian or gold dollar, she quit Canada and came to New York to try and live on greenbacks.

Now, we object to this impoverished widow being forced to pay taxes on the remnants of her greenbacks, to make United States bondholders millionaires! The United States Government made greenbacks legal tender for her contract in Gold with the State of New York. That government did thereby impair the validity of contracts! It did make something besides gold and silver a legal tender for debts contracted in gold.

"Now, whatever sympathy we may have for the creditors of governments that contracted debts with no recognition of any other money than gold-we have very little for any who lent money on faith of being paid in gold, to a government that had just sanctioned the paying off gold debts with greenbacks. From the day, in 1862, when the United States Government came to violate contracts in gold, and to declare greenback paper a legal tender for debts in gold, we leave the creditors of that government to some other resort than a plea of equity, to get anything but greenbacks for the loans made to such an administration of government.

"Alexander Smith died in 1860. It was in the early spring of 1861, that his executors closed up his estate. The times were very gloomy. It was doubtful what real property, a year or two later, might fall to, in New York. A sale was made, on what was considered very advantageous terms, of real estate near this city. The property was sold for a certain amount down, and for fifty thousand dollars secured on bond and mortgage, to be paid within five years, any time the purchaser chose to pay it. The purchaser elected to pay off the mortgage in 1864, at a time when greenbacks were worth less than forty cents on the dollar! The nominal worth of the property sold had, meantime, more than doubled. Its price, in gold, in which the transaction was made, would have been a little less than in 1861. But the Government came in, and compelled a family of helpless orphans to take greenbacks as a legal tender for gold! It compelled them to take twenty thousand dollars, gold value, for what had been sold for fifty thousand!

The guardians of these poor orphans of Mr. Smith invested these twenty thousand dollars of gold value-nominally fifty thousand, greenbacks-on bond and mortgage. But the bondholders, with their eyes open to the fact that the Government had repudiated payment of the debts in gold, contracted with that Government for bonds to be paid in gold? It is but the first step that is hard. That is an old proverb. Bondholders made a contract, on a gold basis, with a government that had just enforced the principle of paying gold debts with greenbacks. If bondholders did not have their eyes open to the character of the party they were dealing with it is their own fault.

But, this is not all! The fifty thousand greenbacks of Mr. Smith's poor orphans-paid to them (when only worth twenty thousand in gold)-is now taxed to pay in gold these bonds that were contracted by a government that had already avowed the power of making greenbacks a legal tender for gold.

To reconstruct the finances of the country is a necessary step toward a general reconstruction. So, however old Mr. Moneybags may roll up his eyes at the proposition, we put it to the people, squarely-what the poor orphans had to take for the gold value of their deceased father's property-what the widow had to take for her gold investment in State stocks. Mr. Moneybags and Mr. Shoddy, and all that set, will have to take for their loans to a Government that, at the very moment these bonds were given, was enforcing the acceptance of a greenback only worth forty dollars as 'legal tender' for the debt of one hundred dollars.

"This established custom of the United States Government is why we call it rightly 'an old way of paying new debts!'

We submit this item of a new reconstruction to the meditation of those whose gold has already turned to greenbacks. Give us one currency for all."