We are told, that it is necessary to separate, divorce the government from the banks. Let us not be deluded by sounds. Senators might as well talk of separating the government from the states, or from the people, or from the country. We are all—people, states, union, banks—bound up and interwoven together, united in fortune and destiny, and all, all entitled to the protecting care of a parental government. You may as well attempt to make the government breathe a different air, drink a different water, be lighted and warmed by a different sun from that of the people! A hard money government, and a paper money people! A government, an official corps—the servants of the people—glittering in gold, and the people themselves, their masters, buried in ruin, and surrounded with rags.
No prudent or practical government, will in its measures run counter to the long-settled habits and usages of the people. Religion, language, laws, the established currency and business of a whole country, cannot be easily or suddenly uprooted. After the denomination of our coin was changed to dollars and cents, many years elapsed before the old method of keeping accounts, in pounds,shillings, and pence, was abandoned; and, to this day, there are probably some men of the last century who adhere to it. If a fundamental change becomes necessary, it should not be sudden, but conducted by slow and cautious degrees. The people of the United States have been always a paper money people. It was paper money that carried us through the revolution, established our liberties, and made us a free and independent people. And, if the experience of the revolutionary war convinced our ancestors, as we are convinced, of the evils of an irredeemable paper medium, it was put aside only to give place to that convertible paper, which has so powerfully contributed to our rapid advancement, prosperity, and greatness.
The proposed substitution of an exclusive metallic currency to the mixed medium with which we have been so long familiar, is forbidden by the principles of eternal justice. Assuming the currency of the country to consist of two thirds of paper and one of specie; and assuming, also, that the money of a country, whatever may be its component parts, regulates all values, and expresses the true amount which the debtor has to pay to his creditor, the effect of the change upon that relation, and upon the property of the country, would be most ruinous. All property would be reduced in value to one third of its present nominal amount, and every debtor would, in effect, have to pay three times as much as he had contracted for. The pressure of our foreign debt would be three times as great as it is, whilst the six hundred millions, which is about the sum now probably due to the banks from the people, would be multiplied into eighteen hundred millions.
But there are some more specific objections to this project of sub-treasuries, which deserve to be noticed. The first is its insecurity. The sub-treasurer and his bondsmen constitute the only guarantee for the safety of the immense sums of public money which pass through his hands. Is this to be compared with that which is possessed through the agency of banks? The collector, who is to be sub-treasurer, pays the money to the bank, and the bank to the disbursing officer. Here are three checks; you propose to destroy two of them; and that most important of all, the bank, with its machinery of president, directors, cashier, teller, and clerks, all of whom are so many sentinels. At the very moment, when the secretary of the treasury tells us how his sub-treasury system will work, he has communicated to congress a circular, signed by himself, exhibiting his distrust in it; for he directs in that circular that the public moneys, when they amount to a large sum, shall be specially deposited with these very banks which he would repudiate. In the state of Kentucky, (other gentlemen can speak of their respective states,) although it has existed but about forty-five years, three treasurers, selected by the legislature for their established characters of honor and probity, proved faithless. And the history of the delinquencyof one, is the history of all. It commenced in human weakness, yielding to earnest solicitations for temporary loans, with the most positive assurances of a punctual return. In no instance was there originally any intention to defraud the public. We should not expose poor human nature to such temptations. How easy will it be, as has been done, to indemnify the sureties out of the public money, and squander the residue?
Second, then there is the liability to favoritism. In the receipts, a political partisan or friend may be accommodated in the payment of duties, in the disbursement, in the purchase of bills, in drafts upon convenient and favorable offices, and in a thousand ways.
Third, the fearful increase of executive patronage. Hundreds and thousands of new officers are to be created; for this bill is a mere commencement of the system, and all are to be placed under the direct control of the president.
The senator from South Carolina, (Mr. Calhoun,) thinks that the executive is now weak, and that no danger is to be apprehended from its patronage. I wish to God I could see the subject in the same light that he does. I wish that I could feel free from that alarm at executive encroachments by which he and I were so recently animated. Where and how, let me ask, has that power, lately so fearful and formidable, suddenly become so weak and harmless? Where is that corps of one hundred thousand office-holders and dependents, whose organized strength, directed by the will of a single man, was lately held up in such vivid colors and powerful language by a report made by the senator himself? When were they disbanded? What has become of proscription? Its victims may be exhausted, but the spirit and the power which sacrificed them remain unsubdued. What of the dismissing power? What of the veto? Of that practice of withholding bills contrary to the constitution, still more reprehensible than the abuses of the veto? Of treasury orders, put in force and maintained in defiance and contempt of the legislative authority? And, although last, not least, of that expunging power which degraded the senate, and placed it at the feet of the executive?
Which of all these numerous powers and pretensions has the present chief magistrate disavowed? So far from disclaiming any one of them, has he not announced his intention to follow in the very footsteps of his predecessor? And has he not done it? Was it against the person of Andrew Jackson, that the senator from South Carolina, so ably coöperated with us? No, sir; no, sir; no. It was against his usurpations, as we believed them, against his arbitrary administration; above all, against that tremendous and frightful augmentation of the power of the executive branch of the government; that we patriotically but vainly contended. The person of the chief magistrate is changed; but there stands the executive power, perpetuated in all its vast magnitude, undiminished,reasserted, and overshadowing all the other departments of the government. Every trophy which the late president won from them, now decorates the executive mansion. Every power, which he tore from a bleeding constitution, is now in the executive armory, ready, as time and occasion may prompt the existing incumbent, wherever he may be, to be thundered against the liberties of the people.
Whatever may have been the motives of the course of others, I owe it to myself and to truth to say, that, in deprecating the election of general Andrew Jackson to the office of chief magistrate, it was not from any private considerations, but because I considered it would be a great calamity to my country; and that, in whatever opposition I made to the measures of his administration, which more than realized my worst apprehensions, I was guided solely by a sense of public duty. And I do now declare my solemn and unshaken conviction, that, until the executive power, as enlarged, extended, and consolidated by him, is reduced within its true constitutional limits, there is no permanent security for the liberties and happiness of this people.
Fourth; lastly, pass this bill, and whatever divorce its friends may profess to be its aim, that perilous union of the purse and the sword, so justly dreaded by our British and revolutionary ancestors, becomes absolute and complete. And who can doubt it, who knows that over the secretary of the treasury at Washington, and every sub-treasurer, the president claims the power to exercise uncontrolled sway, to exact implicit obedience to his will?