"Legal tender" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cheap amusement of breaking and satisfying the law of the Twelve Tables. Veratius ran through the streets striking on the face the inoffensive passengers, and his attendant purse-bearer immediately silenced their clamors by the legal tender of twenty-five pieces of copper, about the value of one shilling. The equity of the praetors examined and estimated the distinct merits of each particular complaint. In the adjudication of civil damages the magistrate assumed the right to consider ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... made to the Comstock's delight in humor of a positive sort. The practical joke was legal tender in Virginia. One might protest and swear, but he must take it. An example of Comstock humor, regarded as the finest assay, is an incident still told of Leslie Blackburn and Pat Holland, two gay men about ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... New York with the mails. In 1862 the war tax and stamp act came in force. It was high and quite a hardship for some but everybody paid it cheerfully and with a good grace, and felt that they were getting off easy. About this time greenbacks came into circulation as money. It was legal tender and you could not refuse it. It made a great deal of hard feeling on many occasions but after a long time it set settled down to a premium on gold, which fluctuated from day to day. Finally the premium on gold was so high that currency was only ...
— California 1849-1913 - or the Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty-four - Years' Residence in that State. • L. H. Woolley
... public institutions, and their commercial regulations.[2] Provincial misunderstandings, that should have been avoided, seriously retarded the building of the Inter-colonial Railway. 'The very currencies differ,' said Lord Carnarvon in the House of Lords. 'In Canada the pound or the dollar are legal tender. In Nova Scotia, the Peruvian, Mexican, Columbian dollars are all legal; in New Brunswick, British and American coins are recognized by law, though I believe that the shilling is taken at twenty-four cents, which is less than its value; in Newfoundland, ...
— The Fathers of Confederation - A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion • A. H. U. Colquhoun
... were not the only allies; the whole government in all its branches was alive with them. Just at that moment the Supreme Court was about to take up the Legal Tender cases where Judge Curtis had been employed to argue against the constitutional power of the Government to make an artificial standard of value in time of peace. Evarts was anxious to fix on a line of argument that should have a chance of standing up against that of Judge Curtis, and ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... less than $1 is not a legal tender for more than $5.00. Copper and nickel coin is ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... was the law passed by Parliament in the same year for regulating colonial currency. With the rapid development of commerce in the eighteenth century, and on account of the steady flow of specie to London, the colonies had commonly resorted to the use of paper money as a legal tender in the payment of local debts. Such men as Franklin and Colden defended the practice on the ground of necessity, and it was undoubtedly true that without the issue of new bills of credit the colonies ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... insisted on the memorial taking the usual course of reference to a committee. He directed the House also in the correct path in its legislation as to foreign coins. It was proposed to take from them the quality of legal tender; but he showed that it was policy not to discriminate against such coins until the mint could supply a sufficiency for the use of the country. In this argument he estimated the entire amount of specie in the United States at eight millions of dollars. At this early ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... by compelling these duties to be paid in specie, drained away the little ready money remaining in the colonies, "as though the best way to cure an emaciated body, whose juices happened to be tainted, was to leave it no juices at all." They assailed the injustice that refused {88} to recognize as legal tender any paper bills of credit issued by the colonies. Politicians, guided by the intelligence and the inspiration of Burke, applauded the Americans for their firmness in resolving to subsist to the utmost of their power upon their own productions and manufactures. They urged ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... chambermaid roaming the hall must have heard me, for the key rattled in the lock just as I slipped out of the window. There's Leary's suitcase and I've packed it with our soiled linen and stuck in a pair of shoes for weight. Seebrook's legal tender is neatly rolled up in my best silken hose in my kit bag. Hark! There's Seebrook tumbling into his bed, which is ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... etc. It must be confessed he paid for what he took in Confederate scrip, but as this paper money was not worth ten cents a bushel, there was very little consolation in receiving it. His followers made it a legal tender at the stores for everything they wanted. Having had some horses stolen, he sternly called on the city authorities to pay him their full value. They did so without a murmur—in Confederate money. ...
— Chancellorsville and Gettysburg - Campaigns of the Civil War - VI • Abner Doubleday
... it produces good only. And three of these cases are illustrated by recent American experience. First, as Mr. Goldwin Smith—no unfavourable judge of anything American—justly said some years since, the capital error made by the United States Government was the "Legal Tender Act," as it is called, by which it made inconvertible paper notes issued by the Treasury the sole circulating medium of the country. The temptation to do this was very great, because it gave at once a great war fund when it was needed, and with no pain to any one. If the notes of a Government supersede ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... is not money, it is only the government's promise to pay a dollar. As long as you can send it to the treasury and get a gold dollar in exchange, it is worth a dollar. It is this exchangeableness that makes it worth a dollar. When government makes the paper dollar note a "legal tender." i.e., when it refuses to give you the gold dollar and makes you take its note instead, the note soon ceases to be worth a dollar. You would rather have the gold than the note, for the mere fact that government refuses to give the gold shows that it is in financial difficulties. So the ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... N. money, legal tender; money matters, money market; finance; accounts &c. 811; funds, treasure; capital, stock; assets &c.(property) 780; wealth &c. 803; supplies, ways and means, wherewithal, sinews of war, almighty dollar, needful, cash; mammon. [colloquial terms for money] dough, cabbage. money-like instruments, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... of pinks to the rosiest Trotskyite red. But, he decided he'd never expected to wind up after a bunch of weirds whose sole actionable activity to date seemed to be the counterfeiting of a fantastic amount of legal tender which thus far they were making ...
— Status Quo • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... only legal tender in the world to true success. The gods sell everything for that, nothing without it. You will never find success "marked down." The door to the temple of success is never left open. Every one who enters makes his own door, which closes behind him to ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... Congress money and receive in return loan-office certificates bearing interest and payable in three years. But little money came from this source; and the people refused to take the bills of credit at their face value. The states then made them legal tender, that is, made them lawful money for the payment of debts. But as they became more and more plentiful, prices of everything paid for in Continental money rose higher and higher. From an old bill of January, 1781, it appears that in Philadelphia a pair of boots cost $600 in paper dollars; six yards ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... and quite a number of business-men were demonetized at the same time; so in 1878 silver was made a legal tender for all debts. As a result, in 1879 gold for the first time in seventeen years ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... the lack of circulating medium, the payment of back taxes in certain specified articles other than money was authorized, and real and personal estate at appraised value was made legal tender in actions for debt and in satisfaction for executions. An act was also passed and others were promised reducing the justly complained of costs of legal processes, and the fee tables of attorneys, sheriffs, clerks of courts and justices, ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... yet not break the back of industry which alone could pay them; loans, in every form that financial skill could devise, and to the farthest verge of the public credit; and, finally, the extreme resort of governments under the last stress and necessity, of the subversion of the legal tender, by the substitution of what has been aptly and accurately called the "coined credit" of the Government for its coined money—all these exigencies and all these expedients made up the daily problems of the Secretary's life. ...
— Eulogy on Chief-Justice Chase - Delivered by William M. Evarts before the Alumni of - Dartmouth College, at Hanover • William M. Evarts
... of foreign coin; they refused to give it power to establish corporations—the agents then as now chiefly employed to create a paper currency; they prohibited the States from making anything but gold and silver a legal tender in payment of debts; and the First Congress directed by positive law that the revenue should be received in ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... interfere with interstate commerce. No state may pass any law impairing the obligation of contracts. The states have practically no control over the monetary system. They may not coin money, emit bills of credit, or make anything but gold and silver coin legal tender. States may charter and regulate state banks, however, and may also authorize a state bank to issue notes ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... two metals (gold and silver) in the currency of a country as legal tender at a fixed relative value, the ratio usually ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... a solemn warning of the dangers to which we now are exposed through our present acts of coinage and legal tender, whereby our gold coin sooner or later must be driven from the country and our standard must become a silver dollar of light weight and uncertain value. He also shows conclusively the futility of legislation in causing two substances to become and remain of the same value. Mr. Edward Atkinson ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... dicker whenever an opportunity offered. The craftsman purchased what necessities or comforts he needed, and paid in the work of his hands. The possessor of one article of daily use traded his superfluity for another article, and for all articles furs and skins were legal tender, as they could be sent east and ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... money, and it therefore will be necessary, in order to procure the one of the higher current value, to pay a premium for it, called the agio. (b) The term is also used to denote the difference in exchange between two currencies in the same country; where silver coinage is the legal tender, agio is sometimes allowed for payment in the more convenient form of gold, or where the paper currency of a country is reduced below the bullion which it professes to represent, an agio is payable on the appreciated currency. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... foreign financing, and foreign firms have hesitated to invest there. The economy remains heavily dependent on agriculture and government service, which together employ about half of the work force. Moreover, the small, vulnerable economy has suffered because the Turkish lira is legal tender. To compensate for the economy's weakness, Turkey provides direct and indirect aid to nearly every sector. In January 1997, Turkey signed a $250 million economic cooperation accord with the Turkish Cypriot area to ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... those days there was a scarcity of money in the diggings. Gold dust there was in plenty, but no COIN. You can fancy it was a bother to weigh out a pinch of dust every time you wanted a drink of whiskey or a pound of flour; but there was no other legal tender. Pretty soon, however, a lot of gold and silver pieces found their way into circulation in our camp and the camps around us. They were foreign—old French and English coins. Here's one of them that I ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... year 1684 Charles the Second is said to have issued tin coinage; had he made it a legal tender in 1646, when it was plentiful and precious as an article of barter, the speculation might have ...
— The Coinages of the Channel Islands • B. Lowsley
... into two classes, true and false, is unsatisfactory. On the face of it, an aneurysm which is false is not an aneurysm, any more than a false bank-note is legal tender. A better classification is into spontaneous and traumatic. The man who has chronic inflammation of a large artery, the result, for instance, of gout, arduous, straining work, or kidney-disease, and whose artery yields under cardiac pressure, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... notions in favor of gold and silver, which he considered the true standards of wealth and mediums of commerce, and one of his first edicts was that all duties to government should be paid in those precious metals, and that seawant, or wampum, should no longer be a legal tender. ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... restricted to small money in consequence of the Roman conquest, and that in Sicily and Sardinia the -denarius- obtained legal circulation at least side by side with the older silver currency and probably very soon became the exclusive legal tender. With equal if not greater rapidity the Roman silver coinage penetrated into Spain, where the great silver-mines existed and there was virtually no earlier national coinage; at a very early period ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... registered claim against specified property, it would doubtless have given a permanent support to the finances of the Government. As it was it proved, at first, a successful step, and it was only by gradual stages and from unwise measures that it eventually failed. In April 1790, assignats were made legal tender; a few months later they ceased to bear interest,—in other words, though still bonds on their face they really became paper money. In September 1790, another 800 millions were issued, and in June another 600, ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... provided the Bank of England continued liable, as at present, to defray in the current coin of the realm all its existing engagements, it was expedient that its promissory notes should be constituted a legal tender for sums of L5 and upwards". In other words, country bankers would no longer be compelled to cash their own notes, or pay off their deposits in gold, but might use Bank of England notes instead, above the value of L5. The Bank of England, however, and all its branches, remained liable ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... repeated since, that the War expenditure would have been much less if the amounts needed beyond what could be secured by present taxation had been supplied entirely by the proceeds of bonds. In addition, however, to the issues of bonds, the government issued currency to a large amount, which was made legal tender and which on the face of it was not made ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... was issued to the owner of each hogshead that passed the inspection. These notes were legal tender within the county issued, and adjacent counties, except when the counties were separated by a large river. They circulated freely and eventually came into the possession of a buyer who, by presenting them at the warehouse named on the notes, exchanged them for the specified amount of tobacco. ...
— Tobacco in Colonial Virginia - "The Sovereign Remedy" • Melvin Herndon
... 5th of the previous November, during the extra session, the House passed, under a suspension of the rules, a bill for the free coinage of silver dollars of 412-1/2 grains, full legal tender for all debts public and private. Mr. Richard P. Bland of Missouri was the author of the measure. The vote upon it stood 163 ayes to 34 noes, 93 members not voting. It was reported in the Senate ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... of the latter date, however, condemned the Income Tax decision and government by injunction. The Democratic platform also hinted at the possible reorganization of the Supreme Court—the means employed by the Republican party to secure a reversal of the Legal Tender decision of 1869. ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... as adversity in the South was to the Confederacy. Rather than advertise a collapse of the federal credit by selling bonds at a discount of twenty to forty per cent the guiding spirits at Washington decided to issue notes as legal tender to the amount of $150,000,000, increased to $300,000,000 a little later. Immediately, bankers and business men who refused to take bonds protested with such vigor and resolution that Chase and Lincoln, unlearned in the ways of finance, ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd |
