The interest of the public creditor is indissolubly bound up with the interest of the whole people.  Whatever affects him affects us all; and the evil that we might inflict upon him by paying an inferior dollar would recoil upon us with a vengeance as manifold as the aggregate wealth of the Republic transcends the comparatively small limits of our bonded debt.  And remember that our aggregate wealth is always increasing, and our bonded debt steadily growing less!  If paid in a good silver dollar, the bondholder has nothing to complain of.  If paid in an inferior silver dollar, he has the same grievance that will be uttered still more plaintively by the holder of the legal-tender note and of the national-bank bill, by the pensioner, by the day-laborer, and by the countless host of the poor, whom we have with us always, and on whom the most distressing effect of inferior money will be ultimately precipitated.

But I must say, Mr. President, that the specific demand for the payment of our bonds in gold coin and in nothing else, comes with an ill grace from certain quarters.  European criticism is levelled against us and hard names are hurled at us across the ocean, for simply daring to state that the letter of our law declares the bonds to be payable in standard coin of July 14, 1870; expressly and explicitly declared so, and declared so in the interest of the public creditor, and the declaration inserted in the very body of the eight hundred million of bonds that have been issued since that date.  Beyond all doubt the silver dollar was included in the standard coins of that public act.  Payment at that time would have been as acceptable and as undisputed in silver as in gold dollars, for both were equally valuable in the European as well as in the American market.  Seven-eighths of all our bonds, owned out of the country, are held in Germany and in Holland, and Germany has demonetized silver and Holland has been forced thereby to suspend its coinage, since the subjects of both powers purchased our securities.  The German Empire, the very year after we made our specific declaration for paying our bonds in coin, passed a law destroying so far as lay in their power the value of silver as money.  I do not say that it was specially aimed at this country, but it was passed regardless of its effect upon us, and was followed, according to public and undenied statement, by a large investment on the part of the German Government in our bonds, with a view, it was understood, of holding them as a coin reserve for drawing gold from us to aid in establishing their gold standard at home.  Thus, by one move the German Government destroyed, so far as lay in its power, the then existing value of silver as money, enhanced consequently the value of gold, and then got into position to draw gold from us at the moment of their need, which would also be the moment of our own sorest distress.  I do not say that the German Government in these successive steps did a single thing which it had not a perfect