capable of securing a vote, which money or cunning could command, would be left untried. And as President Jackson, with characteristic frankness, had stated in his last annual message, that "the great desideratum in modern times, was an efficient check upon the power of the banks, preventing that excessive issue of paper whence arise those fluctuations in the standard of value which render uncertain the rewards of labor," it could not be expected that one who stood pledged, by the actions of his whole life, not less than by promises, to faith fully exert his energies to advance an object so noble in itself, and so materially affecting the drones of society who preyed upon industry, and relied upon their skill to make subservient to their support, and luxurious habits of idleness, the proceeds of the toil and sweat of the producing classes, would be met with less than the most gigantic and franctic efforts of a corrupt and powerful opposition; that money and falsehood would be lavished with an unsparing hand, and that avarice and religion would be indiscriminately appealed to, and promiscuously used according to their respective probabilities of becoming most conducive to success.

Unfortunately for Ohio, to the mortification of her Democratic sons, and much to the dishonor of the State, the result of the controversy more than justified the wisdom of these counsels.

Yet the stern virtues of other States secured the triumph of republican principle in the election of one of its most ardent devotees, and though the State was thus temporarily severed from the Democratic fold, and thrown into the clutches of Federal factionists, the example was not profitless. She had fought the great battle against fearful odds. The excessive redundancy of paper money which circulated in the early part of the year eighteen hundred and thirty-six, was greatly reduced by the salutary operation of the "Specie Circular " of July of that year. From the same date for more than eighteen months the western banks were diligently preparing, often without knowing why, for the general destruction of all their credit which occurred in the spring of 1837, by the withdrawal of their specie to meet the foreign demands of ten millions for interest on stocks transferred to Europe by the agency of the United States Bank. Twelve millions of money then became due for a loan made by the same institution the year before, and fifty-six millions of ready debt for an excess of importations which the unnatural facilities caused by bank loans had mainly encouraged our merchants to incur. The prudent foresight of President Jackson could only discover the nature of the unexampled operations of the paper system after it was too late to do more than check the progress of the expanding process in mid career, and thus partially break the force of the explosion which he foresaw was coming. The banks of the west had gone too far before July 11th, to leave it within his power to interpose any check that would do more than save them from the general crash like the one which

followed similar proceedings in 1819. No means at his command were capable of warding off or preventing the convulsion which ushered in the month of May, 1837—a convulsion to which there is no resemblance in the history of any other people, and which no nation in an equal state of peace and prosperity can ever experience without first following our example, of substantially surrendering to corporations one of the exclusive attributes of sovereignty-the power to regulate the amount, and consequently the power to regulate the value, of the circulating medium. Aside from the immorality of furnishing so prominent an example of violating with impunity all the most sacred obligations of contract, of striking down public confidence, the great bulwark of credit, in a manner scarcely to be exceeded by a blow from the palsying hand of death itself, there were many causes connected with the affair well calculated to embitter the hostility to American Banking, of one who had spent the energies of his whole life in efforts to establish and maintain a currency that would at all times remain an uniform and unchangeable measure of value; among which the most aggravating of all was the fact that the agents most prominent in producing the distress under which the nation groaned in anguish, were, as they had been a few months previous, rallying and concentrating the elements of federal resistance to the salutary work of reformation, and furnishing with an unsparing hand funds to be expended in keeping alive the flames of partisan rancor.

The diminution in the quantity of their notes in circulation, made by the banks during the preceding Presidential election, either for selfdefence or political effect-which, as ever must be the case with all sudden contractions of the currency, fell first and most heavily upon the laboring and poorer classes of society, reducing their wages, and driving them from the employment, in numerous instances, necessary to secure their daily means of subsistence-had been falsely ascribed by political bankers to the effects produced by the friendly Specie Circular which saved their mismanaged institutions from a state of hopeless insolvency. Even the natural results of their own enormities were impudently affirmed to be the legitimate consequences of the judicious measures of the Administration, which, as they urged, forced them tyrannically to pursue the course they had taken.

Arguments and causes of this nature, and, if possible, others even less plausible, were palmed upon every person whose political prejudices, or known propensities, afforded a prospect to encourage the hope, that the absurdity would be received for truth, and reason thereby stultified. It was at such a time, and when every species of talent that art or wealth could enlist was put in requisition to gain credit for the absurdities that all bankers indulge in, and profess to believe, and which, in fact, many are simple enough to actually believe, that the people of Ohio and her sister States were presented with a proposition to establish an Independent Public Treasury, and called upon to

take their stand in favor of or against a thorough and effectual reformation of the abuses of the banking system. To his personal friends, his opinions had been no secret. Nor had his political opponents met with much difficulty in comprehending them. On the refusal of the Steubenville banks to furnish specie for purposes of change, he had volunteered his professional services to prosecute suits before justices of the peace, without fee or reward, on each small note held by a laborer, who should be denied, at the proper counter of the bank, the small change in specie necessary to his convenience in making his purchasers at the market-house; and in near an hundred cases he had made his promise good by successfully conducting such suits. This conduct effected in his own neighborhood the entire expulsion from circulation of that class of small bills which won the distinctive appellation of " Shin-plasters," and became in other parts of the Union a source of great public annoyance and individual losses. But it rendered him doubly obnoxious to the hatred of that most puerile of all small factions, the pseudo-democrats who assumed the once honorable name of "Conservative," and who, for consistency's sake, have since, regardless of former professions, thrown themselves into the arms of their old Federal and National Bank enemies, and sought to propitiate their kindness by out-doing them in abuse of their former friends and principles. The Democratic party of Jefferson County suffered more from the insincerity of such men than fell to the lot of their friends in any other portion of the State, and he felt and urged the importance of speedily unmasking them of their false face of professed friendship, and compelling them to assume their true position, that of open, undisguised hostility to Democratic men and measures. Having been put in nomination as a candidate for the State Senate by the unanimous suffrages of the convention which met in June preceding, to form a county ticket, the Message of the President delivered to the Extra Session of Congress, in September of this year, furnished him a convenient opportunity to enforce the plan approved by his own judgment, and he embraced it readily, by making known his cordial approval of the proposal to keep safe the public money, without loaning or using it between the time of its collection and disbursement in payment of public debts, and forcibly urging the propriety of making such loaning or use penal, and placing it in the same grade and on the same footing as to punishment, with the no more immoral offence of larceny. The justness of the proposal could not be met by fair argument. It was beyond the pale of reason to draw a line of distinction, which should make the voluntary tortious taking and conversion to private use of public funds a more heinous offence against morality, than the voluntary taking of it for the same purpose by one who not only had no greater right to it, but who, in addition to the obligations of duty, and his official oath, could only do so by a betrayal of the kind confidence reposed in him. This course of reason

ing roused the bitterest personal feelings of the Conservative faction against him; and although they yet professed to differ with the Administration only upon this single measure, they united their efforts with the Abolition party and the professed Federalists, and thus succeeded in defeating his election by a few votes. It was good fortune for him and the State, and much to his honor, that the combined forces of the three factions thus blended in one left him under no obligation for even a stray vote. The result laid broad and deep the foundation for future success, when the time came for Ohio to reassert and successfully maintain her own principles. It purged the Democratic party of the false-hearted demagogues, that were ever ready in the hour of trial to yield their professed creed to supposed personal interest, and to insult public intelligence with a view to screen from public notice their perfidy, by raising a false clamor, and endeavoring to create alarm, under the pretence, that there existed a concealed design to increase "executive patronage”—to unite in one man's hands "the power of the purse and the sword"-and to make "two currencies," a better for the office-holders, while the depreciated paper of the banks was to be forced upon the people. This and similar management by Conservatives in other counties, it is true, gave the legislative and executive power of the State into the hands of the Federalists and money-makers, who did many things well calculated to prejudice the prosperity of the people and jeopardy their happiness. They repealed the act prohibiting the issue of small bills-the act forbidding agencies, or the establishment of branches of the Pennsylvania Bank of the United States, or other corporations within the States, unless authorized by law; and they abolished the Board of Public Works, besides passing several other laws manifesting and developing similar notions of public policy and morality. Yet there never was a time when such things could have been done with as little danger of producing lasting injury. There seems to have been a superintending Providence in selecting the time and directing the manner of doing these things. The Pennsylvania Bank of the United States, and all other foreign corporations, were too feeble during the twelve months which succeeded the enactment of these laws, to improve the legislative invitation to flood the State with irredeemable paper-too feeble to enter the lists against the business men of small means, and monopolize the flour, pork, and other staple articles of export. The cotton and sugar speculations in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida were still on their hands, and they could not disembarrass themselves of this business which they had entered into the previous year. The newly created Board of Whig Canal Commissioners found the eastern money market too close to enable them to plunge the State into an irretrievable debt, and the mismanagement of the local banks had attracted public attention too strongly in that direction to leave them the capacity of doing much harm. So that if

Ohio needed a temporary subjection to the powers of plutocracy and federalism, in order to arouse her sturdy sons to a more watchful guardianship of her best interests, we can hardly imagine a time less likely to entail lasting injury upon her character and welfare.

We have already digressed so far on this theme of deep interest that we must be allowed to add a passing notice of the manner and means by which ultimate good was derived from such untoward proceedings. The domination of party power, the triumph of accidental success, emboldened the federal party to promulge, undisguised and in the simplicity of all their naked deformity, the true objects of their worship. There was no concealment, no taking of shelter behind sense-keepers," no committees to intervene between themselves and the people, and prevent the publication of their doctrines-no public meeting where dumb shows, badges, flags, mottoes, canoes, and log-cabins, and their appendages, were made to usurp the places of argument, principles, and reason. No, all was frankness and fearlessness. A currency capable of expansion to-day and contraction to morrow, with a Bank of the United States to control it—a high tariff, and the privilege of using its proceeds-liberal grants of corporate monopolies, and a free construction of the Constitution that would justify the making of roads and other local improvements by the General Government, and thereby secure permanent power in federal hands, were wanted and advocated. Without in any degree subtracting from the merits of a host of young men who rushed to the rescue, and made the hills and valleys of the State re-echo to their eloquent appeals to the intelligence, judgment, and honesty of the people -among whom the name of no one would stand more pre-eminently conspicuous than that of his present talented, generous, and noblehearted colleague in the Senate-we may do him justice for the part he bore in this campaign. Whenever he had any personal influence he exercised it, and when he had not he procured others to exercise theirs with the Democratic friends who controlled that engine so much dreaded by all evil-doers, the public press-urging upon them to eschew all minor topics, and boldly present the principles of their opponents, as they stood recorded by the votes and proved by the actions of their legislators, and the messages of their Executive—to contrast them with their own, exposing the errors of the former, making plain the merits of the latter-and leaving, as the lawful province of the people, the duty of judging each in their sober unbiassed moments under the auspicious influences of right reason and a love of country. Of the proud example which the Ohio press, acting in accordance with these views, gave to the editors of other States in the summer and autumn of 1838, and of the glorious result, it is needless to speak. A law requiring an enlargement of the specie basis of paper money-restricting the amount to be issued-prohibiting the circulation of small bills-making the individual property of stock-hold