was smuggled into existence, on the back of a beer and ale bill, as a mere rider. Nobody dreamed, he said, that they were making a bank; and I dare say the gentleman himself does not dream that he is now helping to make a bank, in advocating the cause of this Sub-Treasury bill. But he may one day or other wake up and find it in existence, and, haply, himself at the head of it. Why, Sir, has he, has anybody forgotten General Jackson's early and often-repeated proposition of "a bank founded on the credit and revenues of the country?" Has that proposition ever been disavowed, either by its original author or any one of his followers? Do those of them here present, all or any of them, disavow it now?

But I will dwell no longer on what this system may be. The bill is quite bad enough as it is. It proposes a total abandonment of the long tried and long approved policy of the country. Heretofore, we all know, a national bank has been the fiscal agent of the government, and among many other important services to the country, has furnished a uniform currency for its commerce. Henceforth, this, and every thing like it, is to be discarded. Hitherto the bills of all specie paying banks have been received in payment of public dues. Hereafter, this wholesome discrimination between redeemable and irredeemable paper, is to be utterly abandoned, and both are to be involved in a common proscription. Heretofore, the people's moneys, when not in actual employment in the public service, have been the basis of bank loans and discounts, and who can calculate the aggregate amount they have added in time past to the wealth of the country, to the wages of industry, to the general prosperity of the people? Henceforth they are to be locked up in iron chests, about as useful to their owners, as the talent of the unprofitable servant, hid in a napkin. Sir, I cannot argue this case myself, much less could I listen to the argument of the gentleman from Gloucester, without being reminded of a pamphlet on the currency, written by Sir Walter Scott, under the humorous title of Malachi Malagrowther, in 1826, when the British Parliament were about trying some new financial experiment upon Scotland. The whole of it might be used here to advantage, but I confine himself to the concluding passage,

"I have read," says he, "I think in Lucian, of two architects, who contended before the people at Athens which should be intrusted with the task of erecting a temple. The first made a luminous oration, showing that he was, in theory at least, master of his art, and spoke with such glibness in the hard terms of architecture, that the assembly could scarce be prevailed upon to listen to his opponent, an old man of unpretending appearance. But when he obtained audience, he said in a few words, 'All that this young man can talk of, I have done! The decision was unanimously in favor of experience against theory. This resembles," says he, and so say I, "this resembles exactly the question now tried before us.

"Here stands Theory, a scroll in her hand, full of deep and mysterious combinations of figures, the least failure in any one of which may alter the result entirely, and which you must take on trust, for who is capable to go through and check them? There lies before you a practical system, successful for upwards of a century. The one allures you with promises, as the saying goes, of untold gold; the other appeals to the miracles already wrought in your behalf. The one shows you provinces, the wealth of which has been tripled under her management; the other a problem which has never been practically solved. Here you have a pamphlet — there, a fishing town here, the long continued prosperity of a whole nation- and there the opinion of a professor of economics, that in such circumstances she ought not, by true principles, to have prospered at all. In short, good countrymen, if you are determined, like Æsop's dog, to snap at the shadow and lose the substance, you had never such a gratuitous opportunity of exchanging food and wealth for moonshine in the water."

This, I repeat, Mr. Chairman, exactly resembles the case now tried before the country. The temple of public credit, so long the ornament, the pride, the defence of the Republic, lies prostrate and in ruins. Its corner-stone has been struck out; its arches have crumbled; its walls are in fragments at our feet. And the architects are now contending before the people, who shall be employed to build it up. Shall it be those who allure us with promises of untold gold, or those who appeal to miracles

already wrought in our behalf? Shall it be those who show us States whose wealth has been tripled under their management, or those who point us to a problem never practically solved? Shall it be the architects of a system which has produced the long-continued prosperity of a whole nation, or shall it be the architects of nothing but the ruins which are now around us? This, Sir, is the exact question. And let it only be fairly put to the people, and I believe their decision will be unanimously in favor of Experience, and against Theory.

But, says the gentleman from Gloucester, the old system was unconstitutional. The framers of the Constitution were hard money men, so said Daniel Webster. And there is not, and never was, any power under the instrument which they adopted to create a national bank. An attempt was made to insert such a power, but the attempt failed, and consequently the power does not exist.

A few words only, Mr. Chairman, upon this very plausible argument. The framers of the constitution were hard money men. So says Daniel Webster, and so says everybody else who knows any thing of their history. In every legitimate sense of that term, they were hard money men - but not in the spurious sense which has been lately attached to it. The framers of the Constitution had experienced the whole horrors of irredeemable paper. That paper had been, indeed, one of the main and most indispensable instruments in achieving their independence. But so had war and bloodshed, the sword and the bayonet. They had now had enough of them all, and were resolved to get rid of them all together. But all were by no means equally within control. A strip of parchment with a few official seals and signatures could put an end to the war and the bloodshed, and it had already done so. A simple word of command could sheathe the sword and unfix the bayonet, and it had already done so. But no treaty and no authority could strike out of existence the millions of irredeemable paper, which were in every man's pocket, and in every channel of circulation. To this evil they were therefore compelled much longer to submit. Long after the excitement of war and the holy rage of a struggle for liberty had subsided, this medium of frauds and

abominations, to which nothing but that excitement and that rage could ever have reconciled them, remained to poison the joys of their triumph. No doubt, then, the framers of the Constitution abhorred irredeemable paper, and in that sense, were emphatically hard money men. But in no other or stricter sense

were they so, and Daniel Webster never said they were.

Why, Sir, do gentlemen forget that our fathers themselves framed a bank charter, before they framed the Constitution? And not only so, but it is rather a curious coincidence, in this relation, that the same pen, or, certainly, the same hand, which gave the last shaping strokes and finishing touches to the Constitution, had a few years previously been employed in making the first plan and original outline of this bank! "That instrument (the Constitution) was written by the fingers which write this letter," said Gouverneur Morris in a letter to Timothy Pickering. "The first bank in this country was planned by your humble servant," wrote the same gentleman to Mr. Moss Kent. I refer, I need not say, to the Bank of North America. It was incorporated in 1781 by the Congress of the Confederation. On the application of its President and Directors, the Assembly of Pennsylvania gave it a supplementary charter, in 1782. In 1785, a proposition was brought into that Assembly, precisely parallel to that which has recently agitated the Convention of the same State, to abolish this charter. Upon this occasion, Mr. Morris came to its defence, and wrote an address to the Assembly, going over the whole ground both of contract and of convenience, of justice and of policy. Upon the latter division of the subject he dwelt at great length, examining all the objections which had been raised against the Institution in question. And what were those objections? The same, the same precisely in substance, and many of them almost the same in phraseology, which have been resounding and echoing over the country for the last six years. Let me prove this by stating them.

These objections, said Mr. Morris, are:

First, that it enables men to trade to their utter ruin by giving them the temporary use of money and credit.

"Secondly, that the punctuality required at the banks throws honest men into the hands of usurers.

Thirdly, that the great dividend on bank stock induces moneyed men to buy stock rather than lend on interest.

"Fourthly, that rich foreigners will, for the same reason, become stockholders, so as that all the property will finally vest in them.

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Fifthly, that the payments of dividends to foreigners will be a constant drain of specie from the country.

“Sixthly, that the bank facilitates the exportation of coin.

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Seventhly, that it injures the circulation of bills of credit.

Eighthly, that the wealth and influence of the bank may become dangerous to the government.

"Ninthly, that the directors can obtain unfair advantages in trade for themselves and their friends.

"And tenthly, that it is destructive of that equality which ought to take place in a free country."

These, Sir, are the objections to a national bank which were agitating the public mind less than two years before the Convention assembled by which the Constitution of the United States was framed, and these are the objections against which, one, at least, of the principal framers of that Constitution was foremost in defending such a bank. I might go on to show that others of them were associated with him, either directly or indirectly, in its defence. But I have said enough to prove that, though the framers of the Constitution were hard money men and abhorred irredeemable paper, they were by no means ignorant of the nature or insensible to the advantages of banking institutions, or of convertible paper, but that at the very moment when they entered into the Convention of '87, they must all have been fresh in the remembrance, and some of them in the experience also, of a controversy, in which all the benefits and all the dangers of such institutions and of their issues had been considered and discussed, and in which the former had been decided altogether to preponderate over the latter.

But the gentleman next reminds us that a proposition was made in this very Convention, to give Congress the power to charter a bank, and was rejected. The fact is not precisely so, Sir. Or at any rate there is no evidence of any such proposition on the records of the Convention. As far as any document