Political science quarterly - 1887 Author:Unknown Author Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE GREENBACK IN WAR. THE valuable paper by Professor Henry C. Adams in the September number of the Political Science Quarterly, on the relative merits of tax... more »es and interest-bearing loans as financial resources in war, suggests a consideration of a third and an extremely plausible and pernicious measure of war finance, the levying of a forced loan under the guise of an issue of government paper, — most plausible and pernicious when it has the quality of legal tender affixed to it. We may disregard the notions of the extreme " greenbackers," although they have not yet ceased to wield some influence in politics; but there remain some facts that we cannot afford to disregard. A large proportion of the people of the United States believe that the issue of paper money in the civil war was a necessity, and that its legal tender quality did help it to circulate and to meet the demands of the government. The Supreme Court of the United States has affirmed the constitutionality of the "greenback" in peace as well as in war, and it has declared Congress to be the sole judge of the necessity that warrants the issue of legal tender notes. The extreme ease of obtaining money by printing it, without directly taxing the present generation or seeming to leave to the next a debt to be paid by taxes, will always make it the first device thought of by a finance minister when a large quantity of money has to be raised at once. The value of the legal tender quality in a government issue can be very readily disposed of. Money is used to pay debts and to make purchases. Current accounts need not be considered, for they are usually settled every thirty or sixty days, and the fluctuations of the currency while they are running are comparatively small. The legal tender notes were available by law for...« less