"Mr. Benton had not intended, he said, to say a word in relation to this question, nor should he now rise to speak upon it, but from what had fallen from the senator from New Jersey. That gentleman had gone from the resolution to the bank, and from the bank he had gone to statements respecting his resolutions on alum salt, which were erroneous. Day by day, memorials were poured in upon us by command of the bank, all representing, in the same terms, the necessity of renewing its charter. These memorials, the tone of which, and the time of their presentation, showed their common origin, were daily ordered to be printed. These papers, forming a larger mass than we ever had on our tables before, and all singing, to the same tune, the praises of the bank, were ordered to be printed without hesitation. The report which he had moved to have printed for the benefit of the farmers, was struck at by the senator of New Jersey. In the first place, the senator was in error as to the cost of printing the report. He had stated it to be one thousand nine hundred dollars, whereas it was only one thousand one hundred dollars. A few days ago, two thousand copies of a report of the British House of Commons on the subject of railroads was ordered to be printed. Following the language of that resolution, he had moved the printing of another report of that body, which would interest a thousand of our citizens, where that report would interest one. There was not a farmer in America who would not deem it a treasure. It covered the whole saline kingdom; and those unacquainted with its nature had no more idea of it than a blind man had of the solar rays. It was of the highest value to the farmer and the grazier. It showed the effect of the mineral kingdom upon the animal kingdom; and its views were the results of the wisdom, experience, and first talents of Great Britain. The assertion of the senator, that the bank aided in producing a sound currency, he would disprove by facts and dates. In 1817 the bank went into operation. In three or four years after, forty-four banks were chartered in Kentucky, and forty in Ohio; and the United States Bank, so far from being able to put them down, was on the verge of bankruptcy. With the use of eight millions of public money, it was hardly able, from day to day to sustain itself. Eleven millions of dollars, as he could demonstrate, the people had lost by maintaining the bank during this crisis. But for a waggon load of specie from the mint, as Mr. Cheves informs us, it would have become bankrupt. In addition to this, the use of government deposits, to the extent of eight millions, was necessary to sustain it; and the country lost eleven millions by the diversion of those deposits to this purpose. Congress authorized the purchase of the thirteen millions of three per cents,—at that time, they could have been purchased at sixty-five cents, now they were at ninety-six per cent. This was one item of the amount lost, and the other was the interest on the stock from that time to the present, amounting to six millions more. It was shown by Mr. Cheves that the United States Bank owed its existence to the local banks—to the indulgence and forbearance of the banks of Philadelphia and Boston, notwithstanding its receipt of the silver from Ohio and Kentucky, which drained that country, destroyed its local banks, and threw down the value of every description of its property. The United States Bank currency was called by the senator the poor man's friend. The orders on the branches—these drafts issued in Dan and made payable in Beersheba—had their origin with a Scotchman; and, when their character was discovered, they were stopped as oppressive to the poor; and this bank, which was cried up as the poor man's friend, issued those same orders, in paper so similar to that of the bank notes, that the people could not readily discern the difference between them. It was thought that the people might mistake the signature of the little cashier and the little president for the great cashier and the great president. The stockholders were foreigners, to a great extent—they were lords and ladies—reverend clergymen and military officers. The widows, in whose behalf our sympathy was required, were countess dowagers, and the Barings, some of whom owned more of the stock than was possessed in sixteen States of this Union."
CHAPTER LXVI.
BANK OF THE UNITED STATES—BILL FOR THE RECHARTER REPORTED IN THE SENATE—AND PASSED THAT BODY.
The first bank of the United States, chartered in 1791, was a federal measure, conducted under the lead of General Hamilton—opposed by Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Madison and the republican party; and became a great landmark of party, not merely for the bank itself, but for the latitudinarian construction of the constitution in which it was founded, and the great door which it opened to the discretion of Congress to do what it pleased, under the plea of being "necessary" to carry into effect some granted power. The non-renewal of the charter in 1811, was the act of the republican party, then in possession of the government, and taking the opportunity to terminate, upon its own limitation, the existence of an institution, whose creation they had not been able to prevent. The charter of the second bank, in 1816, was the act of the republican party, and to aid them in the administration of the government, and, as such, was opposed by the federal party—not seeming then to understand that, by its instincts, a great moneyed corporation was in sympathy with their own party, and would soon be with it in action—which this bank soon was—and now struggled for a continuation of its existence under the lead of those who had opposed its birth, and against the party which created it. Mr. Webster was a federal leader on both occasions—against the charter, in 1816; for the recharter, in 1832—and in his opening speech in favor of the renewal, according to the bill reported by the Senate's select committee, and in allusion to these reversals of positions, and in justification of his own, he spoke thus, addressing him self to the Vice-President, Mr. Calhoun:
"A considerable portion of the active part of life has elapsed, said Mr. W., since you and I, Mr. President, and three or four other gentlemen, now in the Senate, acted our respective parts in the passage of the bill creating the present Bank of the United States. We have lived to little purpose, as public men, if the experience of this period has not enlightened our judgments, and enabled us to revise our opinions; and to correct any errors into which we may have fallen, if such errors there were, either in regard to the general utility of a national bank, or the details of its constitution. I trust it will not be unbecoming the occasion, if I allude to your own important agency in that transaction. The bill incorporating the bank, and giving it a constitution, proceeded from a committee of the House of Representatives, of which you were chairman, and was conducted through that House under your distinguished lead. Having recently looked back to the proceedings of that day, I must be permitted to say that I have perused the speech by which the subject was introduced to the consideration of the House, with a revival of the feeling of approbation and pleasure with which I heard it; and I will add, that it would not, perhaps, now, be easy to find a better brief synopsis of those principles of currency and of banking, which, since they spring from the nature of money and of commerce, must be essentially the same, at all times, in all commercial communities, than that speech contains. The other gentlemen now with us in the Senate, all of them, I believe, concurred with the chairman of the committee, and voted for the bill. My own vote was against it. This is a matter of little importance; but it is connected with other circumstances, to which I will, for a moment, advert. The gentlemen with whom I acted on that occasion, had no doubts of the constitutional power of Congress to establish a national bank; nor had we any doubts of the general utility of an institution of that kind. We had, indeed, most of us, voted for a bank, at a preceding session. But the object of our regard was not whatever might be called a bank. We required that it should be established on certain principles, which alone we deemed safe and useful, made subject to curtain fixed liabilities, and so guarded that it could neither move voluntarily, nor be moved by others out of its proper sphere of action. The bill, when first introduced, contained features, to which we should never have assented, and we set ourselves accordingly to work with a good deal of zeal, in order to effect sundry amendments. In some of those proposed amendments, the chairman, and those who acted with him, finally concurred. Others they opposed. The result was, that several most important amendments, as I thought, prevailed. But there still remained, in my opinion, objections to the bill, which justified a persevering opposition till they should be removed."
He spoke forcibly and justly against the evils of paper money, and a depreciated currency, meaning the debased issues of the local banks, for the cure of which the national bank was to be the instrument—not foreseeing that this great bank was itself to be the most striking exemplification of all the evils which he depicted. He said:
"A disordered currency is one of the greatest of political evils. It undermines the virtues necessary for the support of the social system, and encourages propensities destructive of its happiness. It wars against industry, frugality, and economy; and it fosters the evil spirits of extravagance and speculation. Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effectual than that which deludes them with paper money. This is the most effectual of inventions to fertilize the rich man's field, by the sweat of the poor man's brow. Ordinary tyranny, oppression, excessive taxation, these bear lightly on the happiness of the mass of the community, compared with fraudulent currencies, and the robberies committed by depreciated paper. Our own history has recorded for our instruction enough, and more than enough, of the demoralizing tendency, the injustice, and the intolerable oppression on the virtuous and well disposed, of a degraded paper currency, authorized by law, or any way countenanced by government."
He also spoke truly on the subject of the small quantity of silver currency in the United States—only some twenty-two millions—and not a particle of gold; and deprecated the small bank note currency as the cause of that evil. He said:
"The paper circulation of the country is, at this time, probably seventy-five or eighty millions of dollars. Of specie we may have twenty or twenty-two millions: and this, principally, in masses in the vaults of the banks. Now, sir, this is a state of things which, in my judgment, leads constantly to overtrading, and to the consequent excesses and revulsions which so often disturb the regular course of commercial affairs.
"Why have we so small an amount of specie in circulation? Certainly the only reason is, because we do not require more. We have but to ask its presence, and it would return. But we voluntarily banish it by the great amount of small bank notes. In most of the States the banks issue notes of all low denominations, down even to a single dollar. How is it possible, under such circumstances, to retain specie in circulation? All experience shows it to be impossible. The paper will take the place of the gold and silver. When Mr. Pitt, in the year 1797, proposed in Parliament to authorize the Bank of England to issue one pound notes, Mr. Burke lay sick at Bath of an illness from which he never recovered; and he is said to have written to the late Mr. Canning, 'Tell Mr. Pitt that if he consents to the issuing of one pound notes, he must never expect to see guinea again.'"