These, from their peculiar properties which rendered them the
standard of value in all other countries, were adopted in this as well
to establish its commercial standard in reference to foreign countries
by a permanent rule as to exclude the use of a mutable medium of
exchange, such as of certain agricultural commodities recognized by
the statutes of some States as a tender for debts, or the still more
pernicious expedient of a paper currency. The last, from the experience
of the evils of the issues of paper during the Revolution, had become so
justly obnoxious as not only to suggest the clause in the Constitution
forbidding the emission of bills of credit by the States, but also to
produce that vote in the Convention which negatived the proposition to
grant power to Congress to charter corporations--a proposition well
understood at the time as intended to authorize the establishment of a
national bank, which was to issue a currency of bank notes on a capital
to be created to some extent out of Government stocks. Although this
proposition was refused by a direct vote of the Convention, the object
was afterwards in effect obtained by its ingenious advocates through a
strained construction of the Constitution.
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