as contempt of court.[1] The upshot is that the decrees of the federal court have for years been in abeyance and the legal rights of the bondholders have not been enforced. This incident renders it more than doubtful whether the federal courts could have prevented a number of states from repudiating their debts even if the eleventh amendment had never been added to the constitution. In the words of Lincoln:
In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.[2]
If the status of public opinion sometimes paralyzes the activity of prosecuting attorneys and nullifies the decrees of courts, it also occasionally enforces a higher standard of business conduct than the law requires. Numberless oral agreements are every day faithfully observed which can not be enforced at law. Many a man's word is as good as his bond. Every social group has a code of honor which in some respects exceeds the letter of the law. Probably "Wall Street" suggests a low order of cunning to most minds, and yet there is not place where certain kinds of contracts are more scrupulously observed. The whole fabric of credit so essential to modern business rests upon men keeping faith, and is in the main quite independent of the compulsory processes of the courts. Justice secured by means of litigation is frequently so expensive that it comes too high. Throughout the silver controversy the members of the New York Clearing House steadfastly refrained from paying their daily balances in silver, though Congress required the Clearing House rule forbidding such payments to be rescinded.[3] During the Civil War, Massachusetts paid the interest on her bonds in gold, "though it cost her sometimes nearly three for one to keep her faith."[4] More noteworthy was the maintenance of the gold standard on the Pacific Slope. Legally debtors in California had as much right to tender greenbacks in full discharge of their debts as in any other part of the country, but the fact that a man could not tender greenbacks without injuring his credit and losing standing among business men effectually prevented such conduct. Self-interest resulted in a higher standard of business honor than the law demanded. In like manner competition at the present time frequently compels a higher standard of efficiency and honor among men than the law requires.
