But in fact the measure is one of restriction, not of favor.  To forbid the public agent to receive in payment any other than a certain kind of money is to refuse him a discretion possessed by every citizen.  It may be left to those who have the management of their own transactions to make their own terms, but no such discretion should be given to him who acts merely as an agent of the people—­who is to collect what the law requires and to pay the appropriations it makes.  When bank notes are redeemed on demand, there is then no discrimination in reality, for the individual who receives them may at his option substitute the specie for them; he takes them from convenience or choice.  When they are not so redeemed, it will scarcely be contended that their receipt and payment by a public officer should be permitted, though none deny that right to an individual; if it were, the effect would be most injurious to the public, since their officer could make none of those arrangements to meet or guard against the depreciation which an individual is at liberty to do.  Nor can inconvenience to the community be alleged as an objection to such a regulation.  Its object and motive are their convenience and welfare.

If at a moment of simultaneous and unexpected suspension by the banks it adds something to the many embarrassments of that proceeding, yet these are far overbalanced by its direct tendency to produce a wider circulation of gold and silver, to increase the safety of bank paper, to improve the general currency, and thus to prevent altogether such occurrences and the other and far greater evils that attend them.

It may indeed be questioned whether it is not for the interest of the banks themselves that the Government should not receive their paper.  They would be conducted with more caution and on sounder principles.  By using specie only in its transactions the Government would create a demand for it, which would to a great extent prevent its exportation, and by keeping it in circulation maintain a broader and safer basis for the paper currency.  That the banks would thus be rendered more sound and the community more safe can not admit of a doubt.

The foregoing views, it seems to me, do but fairly carry out the provisions of the Federal Constitution in relation to the currency, as far as relates to the public revenue.  At the time that instrument was framed there were but three or four banks in the United States, and had the extension of the banking system and the evils growing out of it been foreseen they would probably have been specially guarded against.  The same policy which led to the prohibition of bills of credit by the States would doubtless in that event have also interdicted their issue as a currency in any other form.  The Constitution, however, contains no such prohibition; and since the States have exercised for nearly half a century the power to regulate the business of banking, it is not to be expected that