MR. MERCHANT: We'll make you say "well, well" before we get through with you, if it takes till morning.
MR. MANUFACTURER: It won't take until morning and when we get through with him, he will be finished for fair, I think.
MR. LABORINGMAN: We are evidently going to have some fun tonight. You seem to think that you have Mr. Lawyer in chancery. Now, blaze away. I want you to nail Mr. Lawyer on the greenback question, if you can; for he has been getting the best of you on several occasions; personally, I hope I will never get any less of the greenbacks as they are good enough for me.
MR. MERCHANT: But they are not good enough for you, Mr. Laboringman, nor for anyone else, if they are not worth one hundred cents on the dollar; or if they are ever liable to be worth less than one hundred cents on the dollar; or if they are teaching an economic falsehood, so long as they remain in existence; or if they are positively doing the business interests of the country actual harm by excluding a corresponding amount of gold, and finally, if they have no legal right for existence today, even though one may admit for the sake of the argument that it was necessary to issue them to save the nation, an admission which I will not make.
MR. MANUFACTURER: Good for you, Mr. Merchant, that statement has the right ring to it. The greenback is guilty of every one of the charges that you make from my point of view, and so it must always be with every Government issue of money.
You may go back to the very first Government issue of paper money in this country, and follow the practice down to this very hour, and it has left a trail of dishonesty, disaster, ruin and misery unmatched by any other single cause. In my contention for this statement I am going to rely for my historical facts upon George Bancroft, the greatest American historian of our earlier period.
In the fall of 1690, upon the return of an unsuccessful expedition which Massachusetts had sent out to capture Quebec, the general court, the then legislative power, ordered an issue of "£7,000 ($35,000) of printed bills of equal value with money." And the balance of the cost which was £40,000 or $200,000 was issued the following day.
In July, 1692, within nineteen months of the earliest emission, the first legislature under the new charter which transformed the self-governing colony of Massachusetts Bay into a direct dependency of Great Britain, made "all these bills of public credit current within this province in all payments equivalent to money, excepting specialties and contracts made before the publication" of this new law. Their credit was supported by receiving them in all public payments at a premium of 5 per cent.