The acknowledged and imperative indebtedness of the Government was already enormous; contingencies yet to be encountered would undoubtedly increase it, and its weight would press heavily upon the people until a firmly re-established credit should enable the Government to lower the rate of interest upon its bonds.
So long as the Government was compelled to pay its interest in coin, while the business of the country was conducted upon the basis of suspended paper, the burden upon the people would be great.

It would be vastly increased in imagination (and imagination is rapidly transformed to reality in the tremulous balance which decides the standard of public credit) if the Nation should not be able to define with absolute precision the metes and bounds of its aggregate obligation.

Hence the imperious necessity of excluding all possibility of the payment of from two to three thousand millions of dollars to the slave-holders of the South.

If that were not accomplished, the burden would be so great that the Nation which had survived the shock of arms might be engulfed in the manifold calamities of bankruptcy.
The magnitude of the reforms for which the popular desire was unmistakable, may in some degree be measured by the fact that they involved the necessity of radical changes in, and important additions to, the Federal Constitution.

It was frankly acknowledged that if the President's plan of Reconstruction should be followed, involving the instant admission of senators and representatives from the revolted States, these Constitutional changes could not be effected, because the party desiring them would no longer control two-thirds of both Senate and House.