The force and truth of these remarks are amply illustrated by the actual composition of American society, and would be equally felt in England, if, with a system of banking similar to that now in use in the United States, the people were at any time to be deprived (I use that word on purpose) of the influence of the nobility and clergy. It is the absence of high dignitaries, and of men placed by their birth and education above the level of ordinary men, which renders the presence of a moneyed aristocracy in the United States truly odious and degrading; and forces every man of sound sense, who is capable of understanding the true position of the country by comparing it to that of others, naturally over to the democratic party. In proportion as science and literature will be cultivated in America, democracy will become more and more powerful; for it is only vulgar and inferior minds Whiggism can purchase with money.
To the short and pithy speech of Mr. Calhoun, then, Mr. Webster made, as I said before, a seventeen and a quarter column answer. This I surely have no intention of inflicting upon the innocent reader;[27] but, in order to verify the criticism of the democratic senator, I shall quote a few of those passages in which Mr. Webster gives into the poetical,—that is, those passages in which his imagination seems to be sufficiently excited to quote poetry, exhibiting his taste in the selection,—and the grand finale, which will demonstrate his art of sinking the bathos.
At the head of the ninth column, after expatiating at some length on the inconvenience of counting money, which would ensue in case of a Treasury, he says,
“But this is not all: once a quarter the naval officer is to count the collector’s money, and the register in the land-office is to count the receiver’s money. And, moreover, sir! every now and then the secretary of the Treasury is to authorize unexpected and impromptu countings in his discretion, and just to satisfy his own mind. What a money-counting, tinkling, jingling, generation we shall be! All the money-changers in Solomon’s temple will be as nothing to us. Our sound will go forth into all lands. We shall be like the king in the ditty of the nursery,
‘There sat the king a-counting of his money.’”
What mighty reasons these for not having a Treasury! And what glorious quotation of poetry! What a beautiful association of ideas! To think of the nursery ditty in the Senate of the United States! How well Mr. Webster remembers the days of his innocence! and what a talent he must have had, even as a boy, for finance, to remember just the verse which relates to the “king a-counting of his money!”
The next quotation of poetry occurs on the fourteenth column, where Mr. Webster speaks of the issue of Treasury notes, which, as the orator assures us, might be given out by the Government so as to flood the country.[28]
“And now I pray you to consider, Mr. President,” says Mr. Webster, “what an admirable contrivance this would be to secure that economy in the expenses of Government which the gentleman has so much at heart. Relaxed from all necessity of taxation, and from the consequent responsibility to the people,—(this is a wilful misrepresentation of the fact,)—not called upon to regard at all the amount of annual income,—having an authority to cause Treasury notes to be issued, whenever it pleases,
‘In multitudes, like which the populous North
Poured never from her frozen loins to pass
Rhine or the Danau,’—
what admirable restraint would be on Government!” &c.