er depository of debt and credit between mutual dealers,, in the intervals that occur between the commencement and final close of healthful commerce; through its agency trade to the greatest extent may be conducted without the passage of actual money; it transfers the balance of such trade, and if the balance is lacking, it gives the first warning of the excess by its demand for money to supply the deficiency, and thereby restrains further

excess.

Banking, like other commercial business, is properly a private pursuit. To say, and to say it with the force of law, that a selected and privileged few shall engage in that business to the exclusion of all others, and that those few shall be exempted from all personal responsibility for the liabilities they incur in conducting this their private business, is a monstrous proposition in its repugnance to that plain justice which is founded upon equality of rights. It is palpably unjust in itself, at war with the genius of our institutions, and a violation at once of the laws of civil freedom and of trade.

What is it but immunity from responsibility, conjoined with exclusive privileges, that constitutes the very definition of a despotism? and what grosser injustice in principle can a despotism perpetrate?

That banking ought to be left as free, and subject to the same responsibilities as other pursuits in life, is a truth, but a truth that has to encounter that most obstinate of all unbeliefs, the unbelief of self-interest.

The condition of the North and the South, of the East and the West, the condition of the States, of the country, of the commercial world, all bear testimony to its truth with that force which carries the fullest conviction. "Vested interests" alone disbe lieve.

The free banks of New York have that name but in mockery of freedom. It is that freedom which is guarded by law, prohibiting all other banking; it is the freedom to choose where there is no choice. A system of free private banking, commenced when the country was free from commercial embarrassments, produced by the excesses of credit, would of necessity be conducted by men of capital with real capital. The bankers would be careful to conduct their business so as to ensure their own safety, for their fortunes would stand as the pledge of their faithfulness; and banking, restrained by all the inducements of personal safety, must be safe banking for the public. The public judgment of the soundness of paper would then be judiciously formed; individuals would consider themselves the guardians of

their own interests; their individual interests would make them watchful; their watchfulness would make them intelligent; and their intelligence would, ordinarily, defy imposition.

The public judgment of the credit of a bank would then be formed from the aggregation of individual opinions judiciously formed under the influences of the quickening impulses of selfinterest. Under the present system, the legal guardianship of the State is substituted for this public judgment; individual watchfulness is put to sleep under the false hope of State protection, and individual sagacity is therefore at fault, and the public is as ignorant as the individuals of which it is composed, whether credit is deserved or not, and they grope in the dark till they are favored with the startling light produced by an "explosion."

The persons in Buffalo, who, through the medium of legal institutions, flooded the country with their current promises to pay, never could have done so as private bankers, simply for the reason that they never deserved the credit. The good and the bad are now alike respected, and alike suspected. Give individual sagacity free scope, and it would separate the good from the bad, and thereby create and cherish a spirit of high commercial integrity and honor. The prejudices which have been kept alive against free private banking, as a system, are unjust and unreasonable. The instances of private banking which existed when the country was drained of its specie, and the incorporated banks were unable to grant the least relief, and stood themselves in the greatest need of it, instead of being experiments to test a system, were the desperate efforts of more desperate persons to prey upon the wants of a community without resources, without money, and without even bank bills, and whose hunger would make them grasp at that least substantial of all things, the similitude of a bank-bill, the shadow of a shade!

The proper time to try this system would be when the country is recovering her energies, that it might grow with her growth, and strengthen with her strength. The present system can bring the country down, but cannot help it to rise; it cannot keep the country down, but the country can rise without it, and even with it. It has the power of doing great evil in the time of prosperity, but it is impotent to do good in the time of adversity. Under the free system, that high elevation of unreal prosperity could not be reached, from whose giddy height a crashing fall is inevitable. Banks controlled by the laws of trade would be controlled by the laws of their nature. Banks under the control of the State are in a foreign bondage, whose yoke is

uneasy, rendering their service unprofitable. It is objected, however, that there is not banking capital enough in this country to supply the vacuum that would be created by the overthrow of that system of credit. All the capital that now exists would still exist in its unexpanded state, shorn of its false dimensions. The objection presupposes that something may be made by the wisdom of man out of nothing; that the imaginary partakes of the value of real.

Ten thousand air-built castles may all be destroyed and annihilated, without diminishing the quantity of existent matter. The ideal, the imaginary, and the false have deluded us too long to our cost. We want now the real; we desire to exchange instability for stability, uncertainty for certainty. We have suffered under the present system all that the ingenuity of man could inflict in suffering, and humanity rebels at its continuance. Look around and behold its desolating march. It has swelled the tide of debt, in which tens of thousands of our citizens have been overwhelmed. Our country, hitherto as unspotted in her honor, as bright and glorious in her youthful career, is placed by that system in a position which we dare not look at, and which makes us cover our faces for shame. Through the working of that system the sovereign States of this Union are presented in the attitude of prostrated suppliants, begging sustenance, begging their life from the Banks which they made, - penury begging from insolvency! And who can tell where or in what it is to end?

Would it not be fatuity itself to continue the system? Yet we hear it surmised that even Democratic Legislatures may entertain the proposition to renew a Bank charter. It cannot, it must not be so. The calm and sober judgment of that people who dictated the result of the late election cannot, must not, will not permit their will to be so trifled with.

SKETCHES OF CHARACTERS OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

No. VI. THE SERF.

BY THE AUTHOR OF THE BROTHERS,'

," "CROMWELL," &C.

THE morning was already beginning to dawn palely, at least a few faint streaks of light were visible, from the summit of the watch-tower, far on the verge of the eastern sky, when a dull rustling sound made itself plainly heard above the rippling mur

mur of the trout stream in the valley, and the sough of the west wind in the evergreen branches of the pinewood. None but a practised ear could have distinguished then the character of that far sound, but scarcely had it been audible a second before Sir Hugues de Coucy, turning half round toward Ermold, in his steel saddle, said in a clear, strong whisper-"Lo! they come now; lower your visors all, and follow me-silently though, and slowly!"—and with the words, he drew down his own avantaille and clasped it firmly to the beaver; then gathering his reins up with the left, and lowering the point of his long lance that it should not strike the groinings of the barbican, he rode forth cautiously, accompanied by his young squire and the two men-at-arms. Before he left the arch, however, he called to the warder, bidding him see the chains of the portcullis clear, and have his yeomen ready to make fast the gates at once. "Be steady now," he said, "and forget not that deliberate valor is worth ten times as much as headlong rashness. Break but your lances fairly with these thieves, and draw off instantly, leaving me last. Here they come, fifty horse at least, if I may judge by the clash and clang; they will be here anon. Now do your devoir !"

While speaking he had drawn up his little band in line, having Giles Ivernois on his right hand, and Ermold in the centre, the other Flemish trooper holding the extreme left, close to the high fence of an orchard. The road here made a small sweep, of something better than a hundred yards, skirting the verge of the moat and the castle-wall, which, with its arbalasts and mangonels, commanded the whole traverse. It was, moreover, very narrow, ascending in a gentle slope up to the outer gate, giving the knight and his companions the ground of vantage for a charge on the assailants.

Scarce had the knight of Tankerville completed his arrangements, before one loud deep note of the bancloche, succeeded by its continuous and deafening clangor, announced the presence of Talebardin and his Routiers upon the village green, although they were not as yet visible to Hugues and his party, in consequence of the cottages and gardens of the hamlet covering their advance. A loud shrill blast of bugles, blended with the dull booming of the Norman kettle-drum, rose high and keen upon the morning air, quite overpowering for a moment the louder peal of the great bells, while at the signal the broad banner of the House of Floris was displayed on the battlements, and a sustained and welldirected flight of shafts and quarrels was poured upon the enemy from that commanding elevation. In answer to the music of the garrison, the wild marauders set up simultaneously a yell of fierce

t

defiance, which had in its shrill tones something so fiendish and unearthly that it made the hearts of the firmest men thrill, and struck cold consternation through the weaker spirits of the beleaguered garrison. A moment afterward a flash as if of fire was seen springing up through the dry thatch of one of the low hovels, another, and another; and then a broad red glare rushed up from all the burning village, crimsoning the whole canopy of heaven, tinging the dusky foliage and weather-beaten trunks of the old pines with. a strange ruddy lustre, and showing every loop-hole and crenelle in the castle-wall, every serf, man-at-arms, and warder on the battlements, as clearly as if it had been noonday. Directly afterward a shaft or two was shot against the walls from the covert afforded by the scattering groups of fruit-trees on the esplanade, but so well did the archers on the barbican perform their duty, pouring in shot of long and cross-bows, with ver and anon a huge steel-headed beam, launched from the mighty mangonel, that the Routiers in that quarter fell back at once, without as much as discovering the band of de Coucy, which, if it had not been cut off, must have been desperately endangered at the least, if the marauders had made good their charge, and taken a position midway between the barbican and the knight's party. Ten minutes or a quarter of an hour had elapsed thus, when a fresh shout was set up from above the gate. "Gare! gare! Beau Sire!" and a fresh flight of missiles was launched against the spot where the road issued from the hamlet. No more was necessary to set de Coucy on his guard. "Now," he exclaimed, "now! gentlemen!" couching his lance as he did so, and pricking the flanks of his black charger with the spur-at the next instant with their wild yell, and their accursed war cry, the robbers wheeled out from the cottages at a hard gallop, and for the first time perceiving the bold baron, bore down upon him in a solid column of sixty horse at least, with levelled lances. So well, however, had the knight taken his position, that four men only at a time could come against him, the narrowness of the road making it quite impossible for more than that number to array themselves in front with room sufficient for the management of their steeds, and the wielding of their weapons. This, indeed, was the only thing which gave the least chance of success to the defenders; yet even with this chance, the odds were fearfully against them, particularly when it is taken into the consideration, that Ermold, though of a high and dauntless spirit, and from his boyhood upward trained to the use of arms, was in years but a stripling, who therefore could not be expected to cope with full-grown men on terms of equali ty or vantage. The robbers, who formed the first rank, were evidently stout and hardy men-at-arms; he who appeared their