Section 17 On general principles of law and reason, debts contracted in the name of the United States, or of the people of the United States, are of no validity.
It is utterly absurd to pretend that debts to the amount of 2,500 millions of dollars are binding upon 35 or 40 millions of people.
When there is not a particle of legitimate evidence, such as would be required to prove a private debt, that can be produced against any one of them, that either he or his properly authorized attorney ever contracted to pay one cent.
Certainly neither the whole people of the United States, nor any number of them, ever separately or individually contracted to pay a cent of these debts.
Certainly, also, neither the whole people of the United States, nor any number of them ever by any open, written, or other authentic and voluntary contract, united themselves as a firm, corporation, or association by the name of the United States, or the people of the United States, and authorized their agents to contract debts in their name.
Certainly, too, there is in existence no such firm, corporation, or association as the United States, or the people of the United States, formed by any open, written, or other authentic and voluntary contract, and having corporate property with which to pay these debts.
How, then, is it possible, on any general principle of law or reason, that debts that are binding upon nobody individually can be binding upon forty millions of people collectively, when on general and legitimate principles of law and reason these forty millions of people neither have nor ever had any corporate property, never made any corporate or individual contract, and neither have nor ever had any corporate existence?
Who, then, created these debts in the name of the United States?
Why, at most, only a few persons, calling themselves members of Congress, etc.,
who pretended to represent the people of the United States,
but who really represented only a secret band of robbers and murderers,
who wanted money to carry on the robberies and murders in which they were engaged,
and who intended to extort from the future people of the United States
by Robbery and Threats of Murder, and Real Murder, if that should prove necessary, the means to pay these debts.
This band of robbers and murderers, who were the real principles in contracting these debts, is a secret one,
because its members have never entered into any open, written, avowed, or authentic contract
by which they may be individually known to the world, or even to each other.
Their real or pretended representatives, who contracted these debts in their name,
were selected, if selected at all, for that purpose secretly, by secret ballot, and in a way to furnish evidence against none of the principles individually, and these principles were really known individually neither to the pretended representatives who contracted these debts in their behalf, nor to those who lent the money.
The money, therefore, was all borrowed and lent in the dark, that is, by men who did not see each other's faces, or know each other's names, who could not then and cannot now identify each other as principles in the transactions, and who consequently can prove no contract with the other.
Furthermore, the money was all lent and borrowed for criminal purposes, that is, for purposes of robbery and murder, and for this reason the contracts were all intrinsically void, and would have been so even though the real parties, borrowers and lenders, had come face to face and made their contracts openly in their own proper names.
Furthermore, this secret band of robbers and murderers, who were the real borrowers of this money, having no legitimate corporate existence, have no corporate property with which to pay these debts.
They do indeed pretend to own large tracts of wild lands lying between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, and between the Gulf of Mexico and the Northern Pole.
But on general principles of law and reason, they might as well pretend to own the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans themselves, or the atmosphere and the sunlight and to hold them and dispose of them for the payment of these debts.
Having no corporate property with which to pay what purports to be their corporate debts, this secret band of robbers and murderers are really bankrupt.
They have nothing to pay with. In fact, they do not propose to pay their debts otherwise than from the proceeds of their future robberies and murders.
These are confessedly their sole reliance, and were known to be such by the lenders of the money at the time the money was lent.
And it was, therefore, virtually a part of the contract that the money should be repaid only from the proceeds of these future robberies and murders.
For this reason, if for no other, the contracts were void from the beginning.
In fact, these apparently two classes, borrowers and lenders, were really one in the same class.
They borrowed and lent money from and to themselves.
They themselves were not only part and parcel, but the very life and soul of this secret
band of robbers and murderers who borrowed and spent the money.
Individually, they furnished money for a common enterprise, taking in return what purported
to be a corporate promise for individual loans.
The only excuse they had for taking these so-called corporate promises of for individual
loans by the same parties was that they might have some apparent excuse for the future robberies
of the band, that is, to pay the debts of the corporation, and that they might also
know what shares they were to be respectively entitled to out of the proceeds of their future
robberies.
Finally, if these debts had been created for the most innocent and honest purposes and
And in the most open and honest manner, by the real parties to the contracts, these parties
could thereby have bound nobody but themselves, and no property but their own.
They could have bound nobody that should have come after them, and no property subsequently
created by or belonging to other persons.