Mr. Logan C. Murray, President of the United States National Bank of New York city, thus speaks of the National Banking system:
“In 1863 the government of the United States, irrespective of State lines, took hold of the bank question and made it a national one, inaugurating a state of perfection which I believe is unparalleled in the history of finance among the nations of the world.
“This child of the war between the States, born in the very travail of the soul of the nation, is to-day full-grown, of five and twenty years, comely, substantial, and has not been disappointing. Hard money was scarce in 1861. There had been built upon this limited supply, through the channels of credit, a massive structure; suddenly, as the storm arose, the sky became dark and the curtains of night were let down around State boundaries; with these parcels of credit, known as State currency, far from home, with no foster parent hand near by to protect it, intercourse cut off, we found ourselves depending upon a broken staff which was as chaff in the mighty storm, commercial ruin on every hand, and our shores strewn with the wrecks of a dismembered, useless and faithless medium.
“We found the Secretary of the Treasury knocking at the doors of our strongest moneyed institutions, asking from them aid in his great distress, appealing to the wisdom, courage, patriotism and resources of an almost forlorn hope. How nobly he was met is a matter of history.
“Not, however, until 1863, or two years afterwards, did the National Bank system have its birth—born of despair, of want, blood-bought, yea, in the very darkness of that midnight storm.
Yet it is but the survival of the fittest. And now let us see after the uses which have been made of the system, and after the unparalleled prosperity which has come to us as a nation under its influence, if the parent of all this prosperity, to a greater or less degree, is to breathe its last—if its strong arm is to be stilled, and if we are to look for something better. Shall we wonder that men are bewildered when we look into the future and ask what is to supply the vacuum caused by the decay of the National Banking system? I for one answer: