Liberals, at their simplest, thought of the gold standard as self-regulating, but the country’s monetary system could not run on autopilot. The Treasury Department had to monitor trade, the tariff, and the national banks to make sure that it always had enough gold to redeem paper currency and silver coins when presented. To fail to do so would, in effect, be to take the country off the gold standard. Given the difficulty of the task and the efforts of opponents to subvert the system, the country often hovered on the brink of default.
