history of the matter, and what must have been the meaning at the time of those who ordained the Constitution.
No one thoroughly searching this out could have been left with a possibility of doubt. If there was anything from which they had suffered, it was a paper currency, whose value had so depreciated that it had come to symbolize extreme and contemptible worthlessness! There was nothing that they thought more "iniquitous," more "ruinous," more "fraudulent," more "poisonous of the community," more "to establish iniquity by law." That they so regarded paper currency is beyond possible doubt.
It so happened that there existed in the smallest State of the Union, Rhode Island, a faction of anti-Federalists in favor of continuing the power of issuing paper money and passing Tender Acts. They not only seemed to have stood alone, but their answer was left to one of the greatest of the founders of our Government, a man that President Washington so approved that he subsequently made him the Chief Justice of the United States, with the consent and approval of the Senate. Oliver Ellsworth was not only a patriot, but a great lawyer, and no man can believe, who reads his splendid treatment of this subject, that the founders of our Government, by any possibility, could have dreamt that they were creating an implied power to do that which they believed was both dangerous and infamous. In his scathing address of March 17, 1788, "To the Rhode Island Friends of Paper Money, Tender Acts and Anti-Federalism," he says:[1] "The singular sys-
- ↑ "Federal Statesmen Series" (Albert Scott & Co., Chicago, 1894), Vol. II, page 600.
