anticipates, what is that currency to be to the country, and what is the country to be by means of it? This question may be answered by our own history, as it might be answered without the aid of history. It is not to be a national currency, nor a currency partly local, and partly national, maintained every where in the condition of equality, by a universally pervading in fluence, but it is to be a variety of local currencies, subject to local influence only. The State banks, and the State banks only, are to furnish it. They are to furnish it under the patronage of the Treasury, and with a full knowledge of the maxims which have been quoted by the committee, "that the borrower is the servant of the lender," and that he who controls a bank, controls the debtors of a bank," maxims which will be found to lose none of their force when State banks shall feel the effect of their position as borrowers of the Treasury, and debtors shall feel it also as borrowers of State banks that are under the control of the Treasury. It will be a currency wholly removed from that restraint which a national institution is alone capable of imposing, in all parts of the Union; that is to say, free from all banking restraint whatever; for, practically, there can be no restraint where there is no general and pervading power to enforce it. In some, perhaps in several, of the untrammelled and independent State banks, banking will be conducted upon judicious principles, so far as it regards their own operations; and their own local currency may continue for a time locally sound. But where shall be the controlling cause that shall secure this result where the principles of banking are unsound, and where the desire of large profits shall tempt State banks to extend their issues beyond that measure which experience has ascer tained to be the only safe and accurate n easure? Where is to be found the universal presence of a test that will instantly detect excess, an lead to its detection? That test is to be found in a national paper, based upon the precious metals, sustained by the law of the whole land, received in payment of all public dus, circulating every where, and furnishing a standard of comparison every where. Where, again, is to be found the necessity, as well as the power, of applying the corrective? This corrective is to be found in an institution which issues that national paper, and which, in self-defence, and in defence of the nation also, must repress the circulation of every bank that does not provide it with the means of disbur-ing the public treasure in all parts of the United States. The paper that is really sound will be as good as its own, and will be received as such, and may circulate as such. But if the paper of any one of the State banks is not as good as its own, such an institution cannot receive it, because it cannot account for it every where to Government, in an equal amount of its own paper or of specie. If it cannot be received by the national institution, it must return to those who issue it, and the corective is at once applied.

The system of local banks, of which those to be employed by the Treasury are to form a par, is, therefore, defective in this—that their circulation will be local. They will be constantly endeavoring, at least in a great many cases, to send out their paper to excess; and there cannot be the regular application of the corrective, that will as constantly prevent it. It may be repressed in some in. stances, in an irregular way, by sound State banks; it may also be partially repressed by demands from other States; but the effort to do it regularly will be without inducement, and will not be sustained by the requisite ability. Excess will creep upon the country until it is universally diffused; and when an accidental state of the balances shall turn the excess suddenly back upon the banks which have issued it, dishonor will come, and with it universal alarm and bankruptcy. This is the history of the past, and a lesson for the future. A confederation of State banks, sanctioned by the laws of the States, is a scheme which the minority do not think it necessary to combat,

[23d CONG. 1st SESS.

until some one shall propose it, and present its outlines. An attempt to regulate the currency by the operations of State banks, through private compacts with each other, or with the Treasury Department, will probably fail, however often repeated, as it has failed already. A partnership of different corporations, for profit and loss, or for mutual guarantee, with independent boards of direction, is as strange a contrivance for the security of stockholders as it is for the control and regulation of the currency. When the question of providing a regulation for the currency shall be deliberately considered, the minority have no doubt that the project of employing State banks for national purposes will be universally rejected as impracticable.

The hope of obviating all these difficulties by the final substitution of a metallic currency in exclusion of bank paper of every kind, is a mere delusion. No one who re. flects upon the subject at all, can either see how it is to be effected, or what it is to do but harm, when it shall be effected. Through what process are the State banks to be extinguished, as well as the United States Bank? If they continue, how is their paper to be superseded? If the r paper is to remain, who is to exchange a productive capital for apecie to serve as currency, when paper, which costs nothing, will answer the same purpose? Who is to begin the traffic? For specie, like other merchandise, is to be bought and paid for; and it must be bought and paid for by something besides paper. And when there shall be a thorough abolition of every kind of paper from use, how will the gold and silver be better than the paper we have had hitherto, which gave us all the gold and silver we wanted, and did not compel us to take it when we did not want it? What will the country have gained, and particularly the industrious and enterprising, who are without capital, and must borrow it in order to use it-the men by whom this nation has been enriched and strengthened? What will the industrious and enterprising do, after a scheme shall have succeeded which, by destroying paper, will infallibly destroy bank credit, and give to the man of capital a monopoly of the trade and industry of the country? The subject, however, need not be pursued. There is a power in the necessities of men which will baffle all such designs, if they shall be seriously entertained; and this the minority do not, in the slightest degree, apprehend. If bank paper is not to be wholly extinguished, but only diminished by the substitution of metal for the smaller denominations of notes, this, indeed, is admitted to be an object of great importance, and mainly for the reason that, in case of an unusual call upon banks for spe. cie, they may be able the more readily to repair their resources from the channels of the country. But, if this design is to be carried into effect at all, it is demonstrable that it can only be done by a national institution operating with the public treasure, and regulated by laws of Con gress, directed to the great constitutional end of equalizing and sustaining the currency. State banks and he'r operations are to be controlled, and not the controlling power, in the execution of such a design; and, conse quently, the plan of the Secretary for extending the pow. er and circulation of the State banks, is at the farthest possible distance from the object of either extinguishing or diminishing paper currency.

The minority do not deem it necessary to make any further remarks upon the reasons of the Secretary for removing the public deposites, in order to prepare a currency in State bank paper.

vil. Another reason of the Secretary for removing the deposites, is derived from the suppes d pressure by the bank upon its deb'ors, including the State banks, in the months of August and September, 1933, to coerce a renewal of the charter.

The minority deem it an act of indispensable justice to the bank to say, that if reductions have at any time press

ed with unnecessary severity upon her debtors, of which they have seen no evidence, the bank stands excused be fore the world by the course of the Treasury Department. The act of removal has not only been an act of declared hostility, but it has been preceded and followed by all the customary practices of imbittered war. The bank has never been directly apprized of any thing that the Treas ury purposed to carry into effect against her. If made aware of it, it has been through rumors in the streets, or hints in the newspapers, and never from the Treasury De partment, until the moment that he blow was given. The determination to remove the deposites has not, to this day, been made known to the bank by any official communication from the Treasury; no evidence certainly of such a communication has been sent to this House. An order of the 26th September, 1833, by the Secretary to the president of the bank, to deliver to the collector at Philadelphia all bonds to the United States, payable on or after the first of October, was the only annunciation to the bank in Philadelphia; and this, by the collector's tter of the 28th, would seem to have been communicated to the bank on the 30th of September. Yet it is now known that the removal of the deposites was a foregone conclusion a considerable time before tha'.

The times and amounts in which the deposites were to be drawn by the Treasury, were not only not made known, but were concealed from the bank. The Treasurer had been for years in the practice of sending daily lists to the bank of every draft drawn upon it, stating both the date and the amounts, without the names of the holders; and he also sent weekly lis's of the drafts, with the particu. lars in every point. These were the suggestions of amity to assist the bank, by the fullest information of the Treasury purposes. But as soon as the policy of the Treasury Department was altered, and a hostile attitude assumed, the practice of daily and weekly lists was continued; but they did not speak the whole truth. Drafts to an immense amount were withheld from the lists, to be used according to contingencies, and at points where the bank might or might not be prepared to meet them; and the daily and weekly lists consequently became instruments of deception to the bank. The bank was left to ascertain and prepare for the Treasury demand, with deceptive information as to its extent. The minority annex hereto the corre spondence between the Treasurer and the cashier of the bank upon this subject.

And even now, when the cry is still that the bank is oppressing the country, rumor gives out, with her thou sand tongues, that it is the purpose of the Treasury to reject the whole mass of bank drafis at present in c'rculation, amounting probably to more than five millions, and to force them back upon the bank, by refusing to receive them in payments to the United States. The bank is left to ascertain the truth of this also, and to prepare for it as well as she may.

Can it be justly said that the bank has, at any time, done more than was necessary for her protection, when the Treasury Department has made it impossible for the bank to know whether any thing short of defence, at all points and in every form, would give protection?

What is the position in which the removal of the deposites has placed the Bank of the United States? Before that removal, the bank collected and disbursed the public revenue, facilitated the domestic exchanges by means of i', and kept in order the currency of the country every where. The bank then owed these duties to the whole nation, and her obligations to the stockholders were secondary. She is now deprived of the means of performing them, and her obligations to her stockholders and creditors have become primary. The Bank of the United States is now a private bank, forced to become so against the will of her directors and stockholders, not sustained but opposed by the Treasury, and therefore left to sustain

herself. What is to measure her loans to the community, but the sense of her own safety? What is to be the judg ment she is to form of the experiment now on trial, but her own judgment? She considers, and, according to the report of the committee, she is bound to consider, that the sentence of death has gone forth against her; and if this be so, what principle compels her to put the capital of her stockholders at risk upon the issue of an experiment?

The alleged pressure by the bank in August and Sep. tember, 1833, with a view to coerce a recharter, requires to be particularly considered, for two reasons: first, because it is believed that the reason of the Secretary is not in this instance sustained by evidence; and, secondly, be cause it is also believed that what the bank has done, is doing, and will probably be forced to continue to do, is in perfect coincidence in all its parts with the plan which the Secretary intended, by the removal of the deposites, to force upon the bank and the country.

1. The imputed design of the bank to coerce the renewal of its charter, is an inference from the mere fact of its reductions. There is nothing else suggested to justify the imputation, and its propriety is consequently not to be made either more or less clear by argument. If such was the design of the bank, it is impossible to imagine any plan that could more effectually have promoted it, than that of the Secretary. The fact of pressure and diɛtress in August and September, 1833, is however now known to have been assumed as a motive for the removal, without sufficient evidence or consideration. Pressure and distress are, it is true, terms which indicate comparative rather than absolute difficulty, and, therefore, it is not easy to prove that the payment of debts to a bank is not always the occasion of some pressure and distress to those who are compelled to pay. But such as are sufficiently at ease to consider what was the condition of the country during the sixty days which preceded the removal of the public deposites, and to compare it with that which it has assumed in the course of the last two months, will admit that the state of the country, up to the hour of removing the deposites, was a state of comparative beatitude. In the now established sense of pressure and distress, the commercial cities and the country, up to the removal of the deposites, were wholly exempt from every appearance of either. That justification of the Secretary's motive fails therefore entirely in point of fact. Had any such pressure existed, the intention to remove was so justly apprehended for months before it was executed, and the reductions by the Bank of the United States in August and September were so indispensable to her safety, in the extraordinary relation in which the Treasury was about to place her, that few persons, who consider the subject dis passionately, would be inclined to infer a purpose of coercion from that which could be so much more naturally traced to the motive of self-protection.

2. But the conclusive answer to the Secretary's reason is, that what the bank did, is doing, and must continue to do, was, and is, and will continue to be, the inevitable effect, as well as the declared purpose of the Secretary's plan. That plan seems of late to have been put aside for the more satisfactory occupation of censuring the bank, It deserves to be recalled to the consideration of the House. It is to be recollected that the Secretary assumes as a postulate, that the notes of the bank, as soon as the charter expires, on the 3d of March, 1836, "will lose the pecuhar value they now possess, and the notes payable at dis. tant places become as much depreciated as the notes of local banks; and if in the mean time no other currency is substituted in its place by common consent, it is easy to foresee the extent of the embarrassment which would be caused by the sudden derangement of the circulating medium." The Secretary then proceeds to say, that "it is of the first importance to the interests of the public,

Upon the supposition, then, that these measures of administration by the bank have been lawful, the minority take it to be free from doubt, that the Secretary's dissat isfaction with them is not one of the causes which authorized him to remove the deposites. The management of the bank has not been committed to the Secretary. He has no right whatever to inspect its management, or even its condition, except in a limited way, for the purpose of ascertaining the security of the deposites. To have given him the power of removal in any case in which he should deem the management wrong, would have been to give him effectually the management of the bank in every particular. The charter removes all such causes from his cognizance by committing the management of the bank to the directors, under such powers and restrictions as the charter and by-laws determine.

If, on the other hand, the acts thus questioned are violations of charter, the objections to the Secretary's act are equally plain. In the first place, he is not the officer to whom the charter has confided the authority to direct a prosecution for a violation of charter; in the next place, it has expressly confided that authority to others; in the third place, the bank is entitled to be heard before any judgment of violation is pronounced; and lastly, that judgment is to be pronounced by the Judicial department only.

The Secretary's power to arraign the bank for violation of charter cannot be asserted. It is a power of the most delicate and critical nature, and the twenty-third section of the charter commi's it to the President and to Congress only. That the Secretary should be impliedly authorized to decide the whole question, and to remove the deposites at once upon that ground, when the charter does not give him authority to issue a scire facias to have the question tried, cannot be maintained. Those who have au. thority to direct the prosecution, have no right to try it, or to give judgment on it. The Judicial power is not in Congress or in the President, and they cannot exercise it without themselves violating the charter of the bank, and the constitution also. The bank is not even charged with violation of charter. When charged, she will be entitled to a hearing; when heard, she will have the benefit of trial by jury; and when the first judgment shall have been rendered, she will be entitled, if it be adverse, to a review in the Supreme Court of the Union. In the mean time, in the sight of the nation and the law, all her charter rights remain in their original vigor. If the want of sufficient time to try the question is a reason for deciding it without trial, it is one that prostrates all the barriers which the constitution has raised between the assertion

The bank then has a legal right to say, as her directors have said, that she has not been guilty of any violation of charter, and Congress have not the legal right to adjudge the contrary. If they cannot adjudge the contrary, they cannot lawfully deprive the bank of a single privilege or benefit conferred by the charter, upon the ground that she has lost them by violation of charter. Every benefit of the charter is a right of property, and it would be infinitely better for the constitution and for the people, that Congress should at once hold the public deposites to be removable without cause, rather than assign the cause of violation of charter, and enforce the sentence of forfeiture to the extent of a dollar, upon the ex parte report of a committee. The minority do not mean, so far as they are concerned, to impair the chartered rights of the bank, by attempting an investigation of the law and the facts before a body that is not constitutionally authorized to try them.

The exclusion of the directors appointed by the Presi dent is nowhere shown to have been ordered by the board, or by the president of the board. They have not been appointed on certain committees, and this is all that can be said, and the same may probably be said of many directors appointed by the private stockholders. It de pends upon the pleasure of the board, and is a matter of administration. Whether there was any thing in the ca pacity or dispositions of the individual directors referred to, to make their appointment upon certain committees proper or improper, it might be deemed invidious in a paper of this kind to inquire, particularly as it is understood that the Senate of the United States have not advised their reappointment to office, and they therefore do not at present stand in the position of public servants whose act's require further investigation.

The expenditure of money for printing and circulating pamphlets has not been questioned by the stockholders. They have been fully apprized of it, and they have more than once re-elected the directors who have authorized it. The right to print and publish is a constitutional right. It belongs to corporations as well as to natural persons. It cannot be previously restrained, and it cannot be subsequently punished, except by the sentence of a court, when it is proved to have been done in violation of law. If it has been necessary to defend the directors of the bank from aspersions upon their characters for what they have done as directors, or to prevent the credit of the bank from suffering by imputations upon its solvency, or the integrity of its administration, the charge of the expenditure belongs properly to the bank, because it is in vindication of the operations of the bank. As to such expenditures, the stockholders are the ultimate judges, and all the stockhoders are bound by a vote of the majority ratifying the expenditure, as much as they would be by an order to incur it. The subsequent ratification, by the re-election of the directors who ordered it, is equivalent to an original command. Whatever printing or publishing has been done by the bank, has been done openly, without cover or disguise. It has been done in the assertion of a right, and the public have known it. Whether an influence equally public, and equally innocent, has directed and supported those attacks upon the bank, which have thrown upon the institution the expense of resisting them, it does not belong to the minority of this committee to inquire.

2. The case of the French bill, as upon a claim for damages by the bank, is not before the Committee of