Gentlemen in the convention may flatter themselves with the idea that by sacrificing the wishes of their constituents they can form coalitions to elevate themselves to office; but they are mistaken, and when they get through with their mutual congratulations on their cunning they will find they are marked by the people to stay at home as unfit to be trusted just because they could not restrain their own paltry ambition enough to fulfill the wishes of their constituents and place those restrictions on legislative power they knew were desired by the people.

BANKS
[December 9, 1846]

The Whig papers throughout the territory are filled with threatenings as to the fate the constitution will meet when it comes before the people for adoption or rejection because of the, to them, obnoxious bank article. Not content with giving their own views on the matter in question, they anxiously look up and adopt the views of journals in distant states, who in their wisdom see fit to attempt a sneer at the doings of our delegates in convention. This would be all very right, very proper, if they or the journals from which they quote. would attempt by argument or statistics to prove that the proposed law was a bad one and calculated to injure the business and prosperity of our young state; but no, the argument they see fit to advance is confined entirely to comparisons between old states and our young territory. This species of argument has always been used and always will be used by those who have no other, and in the present case, as heretofore, will meet with that success it deserves.

Why, we would ask, should we look for examples and precedents to the state of New York, for instance; in what way can the history of that state be used to favor the creation and sustaining among us of a system that has been so thoroughly tried and with such effect. as it has there? Are we, because the state of New York sees fit to continue a course of policy that facts prove to have been injurious to her interests and the morals of her people, to follow in her footsteps for the sole reason that she is an older and richer community than we are? Or are we because the state of New York continues a course of banking and public improvement that has filled to overflowing the coffers of a few individuals on the one hand, while on the other it has filled her prisons to overflowing and called for the creation of new ones? Why should a people be expected to follow out even to their own ruin a course they know to be based upon

fraud, even though it should (which it cannot) result in great prosperity to the state? Corrupt a government and you corrupt the people. Let it be thought that the government may defraud and the individuals composing that government will certainly entertain the same opinions. What right has government to give one man privileges which it denies another? True, the bank men say that all who please can hold bank stock if they are able and thus reap the advantages acknowledged to accrue from the possession of such stock, but then if they are not able they must be content to let the advantages be gained by their wealthier neighbor who from the fact of possessing wealth needs no further advantages over the poorer citizen. Wealth confined to the hands of a few never yet made happier the world and never will, and this fact, alone, in our opinion, ought to be sufficient to deter a people from granting to any class of men special privileges, such as joint stock companies, etc., but, worse than all others, bank charters.

We might go on ad infinitum with bank charters and their kindred corporations, which to the real wealth of the world never add a single farthing of value, and yet the friends of the system will gravely insist that they create wealth. How? "Oh they (the banks) make money more plenty."

"Money?" you ask.

"Yes; where before there was but one dollar in the country, there are now ten."

Ask again, "What is the basis of your currency?"

"Specie, of course."

There you have it; where there was but one dollar of specie you have now ten of paper and all by the magic of bank charters. But, again, you have worsted your opponent on his specie basis; and he turns round upon you with a most self-satisfied countenance and says, "Why, we have real estate with our specie as a capital; that you know can not be carried away." We'll see. In 1835 real estate was said to be worth such and such prices; in 1846, while every branch of industry is in the most prosperous condition, the same property will not bring much more than a fourth of 1835 prices, and you ask the

reason.

"Oh!" says your bank friend, "money is not so plenty." Why? "Because there are in this present year fewer of these wonderworking institutions that can change one dollar of specie into ten (equally good are they?) dollars of paper." Alas, their blindness is only equal to the impudence of the sneer contained in the lament that our convention did not sit before that of New York.

This arguing against banks and bankers is unprofitable business in as much as every one of them, we mean those in favor of bank institutions, will readily agree that they are bad things in the main, and will only speak in general terms of their value. They know they are wrong, and still they are afraid to discard them. Out upon such policy.

Some of our delegates have been misled in regard to the feeling of the people in this community-misled by the false representations of disguised friends of the system and by the lying statements of its open opponents-and yet we can and do honestly assure them that in our community, our county, and throughout the territory, upon the bank question, could it be presented alone to the people, it would receive a majority greater than was ever before given for any one measure in the territory.

SELECTIONS FROM THE LANCASTER WISCONSIN

HERALD

THE CONVENTION

[December 5, 1846]

"To a man up a tree," it seems that it might have been a very easy matter for our convention, with the constitutions of more than twenty states for a guide, to make a concise, sensible constitution, which the people would be ready to adopt. It is not a constitution with novel and striking features that we require. Our folks are not given to experimenting. The people, at least in our part of Wisconsin, did not expect their delegates to engage in a strife to see who should introduce the most democratic measures. The majority at home utterly despise the narrow, contemptible policy pursued at Madison by a set of men who try to give every measure a party character who with the pride of Lucifer in their hearts affect to be as democratic as Lazarus. Those demagogues who attempt to succeed by loading the van of radicalism, who have sunk to the lowest depth of popular ignorance, beneath "the change of clay," and are drifting in the stratum of party prejudice for political capital, will presently "be caved in upon" by the mass of public intelligence and public opinion and public virtue which they are so rashly undermining. The attempt to erect a party machine in Wisconsin for the elevation of a handful of heartless demagogues who can use it as a Democratic guillotine to behead politically every man who dares to do right has been attempted. That attempt will fail; and the authors of it will sink into merited contempt. The constitution will be rejected. Its friends will be rejected. The people feel mortified that such a monster has been begotten at their expense. The declamations, the silly witticisms, and the noisy harangues in the convention, the ignorance of parliamentary rules, the disregard to decency, the little knowledge of constitutional law, which characterize the body, have made it the derision and contempt of the whole Union. Amongst other things equally absurd the people are to be invited to sanction a provision for making it a penal offense to receive paper promises of payment. This feature alone ought to kill the constitution. It will not stand up long enough for the people to knock it in the head!