James Madison. Gay Sydney Howard

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СКАЧАТЬ or certificates of the States, and these had already fallen to the ratio of one hundred to one; they kept on falling till they reached the rate of a thousand to one, and then soon became altogether worthless. When the estimate for the coming year was under consideration, he proposed to Congress that the States should be advised to abandon the issue of this paper currency. "It met," he says, "with so cool a reception that I did not much urge it." The sufficient answer to the proposition was, that "the practice was manifestly repugnant to the Acts of Congress," and as these were disregarded and could not be enforced, a mere remonstrance would be quite useless. The Union was little more than a name under the feeble bonds of the Confederation, and each State was a law unto itself. Not that in this case there was much reasonable ground for complaint; for what else could the States do? Where there was no money there must be something to take its place; a promise to pay must be accepted instead of payment. The paper answered a temporary purpose, though it was plain that in the end it would be good for nothing.

      The evil, however, was manifestly so great that there was only the more reason for trying to mitigate it, if it could not be cured. Madison, like the rest, had his remedy. He proposed, in a letter to one of his colleagues, that the demand for army supplies should be duly apportioned among the people, their collection rigorously enforced, and payment made in interest-bearing certificates, not transferable, but to be redeemed at a specified time after the war was over. The plan would undoubtedly have put a stop to the circulation of a vast volume of paper money if the producers would have exchanged the products of their labor for certificates, useless at the time of exchange, and having only a possible prospective value in case of the successful termination of an uncertain war. Patriotic as the people were, they neither would nor could have submitted to such a law, nor had Congress the power to enforce it. But Mr. Madison did not venture apparently to urge his plan beyond its suggestion to his colleague.

      Why the Assembly of Virginia should have proposed to elect an extra delegate to Congress, early in 1781, is not clear, unless it be that one of the number, Joseph Jones, being also a member of the Assembly, passed much of his time in Richmond. It does not appear, however, that the delegate extraordinary was ever sent, perhaps because it was known to Mr. Madison's friends that it would be a mortification to him. There was certainly no good reason for any distrust of either his ability or his industry. One could hardly be otherwise than industrious who had it in him – if the story be true – to take but three hours out of the twenty-four for sleep during the last year of his college course, that he might crowd the studies of two years into one. He seemed to love work for its own sake, and he was a striking example of how much virtue there is in steadiness of pursuit. Not that he had at this time any special goal for his ambition. His aim seemed to be simply to do the best he could wherever he might be placed; to discharge faithfully, and to the best of such ability as he had, whatever duty was intrusted to him. His report of the proceedings in the congressional session of 1782-83, and the letters written during those years and the year before, show that he was not merely diligent but absorbed in the duties of his office.

      He was more faithful to his constituents than his constituents sometimes were to him. Anything that might happen at that period for want of money can hardly be a matter of surprise; but Virginia, even then, should have been able, it would seem, to find enough to enable its members of Congress to pay their board-bills. He complains gently in his Addisonian way of the inconvenience to which he was put for want of funds. "I cannot," he writes to Edmund Randolph, "in any way make you more sensible of the importance of your kind attention to pecuniary remittances for me, than by informing you that I have for some time past been a pensioner on the favor of Hayne Solomon, a Jew broker." A month later he writes, that to draw bills on Virginia has been tried, "but in vain;" nobody would buy them; and he adds, "I am relapsing fast into distress. The case of my brethren is equally alarming." Within a week he again writes: "I am almost ashamed to reiterate my wants so incessantly to you, but they begin to be so urgent that it is impossible to suppress them." But the Good Samaritan, Solomon, is still an unfailing reliance. "The kindness of our little friend in Front Street, near the coffee house, is a fund which will preserve me from extremities; but I never resort to it without great mortification, as he obstinately rejects all recompense. The price of money is so usurious that he thinks it ought to be extorted from none but those who aim at profitable speculations. To a necessitous delegate he gratuitously spares a supply out of his private stock." It is a pretty picture of the simplicity of the early days of the Republic. Between the average modern member and the money-broker, under such circumstances, there would lurk, probably, a contract for carrying the mails or for Indian supplies.

      Relief, however, came at last. An appeal was made in a letter to the governor of Virginia, which was so far public that anybody about the executive office might read it. The answer to this letter, says Mr. Madison, "seems to chide our urgency." But there soon came a bill for two hundred dollars, which, he adds, "very seasonably enabled me to replace a loan by which I had anticipated it. About three hundred and fifty more (not less) would redeem me completely from the class of debtors." It is to be hoped it came without further chiding.4

      The young member was not less attentive to his congressional duties because of these little difficulties in the personal ways and means. Military movements seem, without altogether escaping his attention, to have interested him the least. In his letters to the public men at home, which were meant in some degree to give such information as in later times the newspapers supplied, questions relating to army affairs, even news directly from the army, occupy the least space. They are not always, for that reason, altogether entertaining reading. One would be glad, occasionally, to exchange their sonorous and rounded periods for any expression of quick, impulsive feeling. "I return you," he writes to Pendleton, "my fervent congratulations on the glorious success of the combined armies at York and Gloucester. We have had from the Commander-in-Chief an official report of the fact," – and so forth and so forth; and then for a page or more is a discussion of the condition of British possessions in the East Indies, that "rich source of their commerce and credit, severed from them, perhaps forever;" of "the predatory conquest of Eustatia;" and of the "relief of Gibraltar, which was merely a negative advantage;" – all to show that "it seems scarcely possible for them much longer to shut their ears against the voice of peace." There is not a word in all this that is not quite true, pertinent, reflective, and becoming a statesman; but neither is there a word of sympathetic warmth and patriotic fervor which at that moment made the heart of a whole people beat quicker at the news of a great victory, and in the hope that the cause was gained at last.

      All the letters have this preternatural solemnity, as if each was a study in style after the favorite Addisonian model. One wonders if he did not, in the privacy of his own room and with the door locked, venture to throw his hat to the ceiling and give one hurrah under his breath at the discomfiture of the vain and self-sufficient Cornwallis. But he seems never to have been a young man. At one and twenty he gravely warned his friend Bradford not "to suffer those impertinent fops that abound in every city to divert you from your business and philosophical amusements… You will make them respect and admire you more by showing your indignation at their follies, and by keeping them at a becoming distance." It was his loss, however, and our gain. He was one of the men the times demanded, and without whom they would have been quite different times and followed by quite different results. The sombre hue of his life was due partly, no doubt, to natural temperament; partly to the want of health in his earlier manhood, which led him to believe that his days were numbered; but quite as much, if not more than either, to a keen sense of the responsibility resting upon those to whom had fallen the conduct of public affairs.

      CHAPTER III

      IN CONGRESS

      Madison had grown steadily in the estimation of his colleagues, as is shown, especially in 1783, by the frequency of his appointment upon important committees. He was a member of that one to which was intrusted the question of national finances, and it is plain, even in his own modest report of the debates of that session, that he took an important part in the long discussions of the subject, and exercised a marked influence upon the result. The position of the government was one of extreme difficulty. To tide over an immediate necessity, СКАЧАТЬ