The government of the United States was scarcely a year old when a writer in The Connecticut Courant asserted that “the scheme of supporting the money and regulating the price of things by penal statutes . . . always has and ever will be impracticable in a free country, because no law can be framed to limit a man in the purchase or disposal of property, but what must infringe those principles of liberty for which we are gloriously fighting.”[7]
