supplies our mercantile marine with reliable maps, for nothing." The National Mint is another. "And what a convenience to the miner! By all means let us have another at San Francisco." The National Pacific Railroad is another. "Besides binding the Californians all the closer to us, and enabling us to move an army quickly to the Gold Coast, observe what an advantage it will be to the Mormons!"

The evidences of success which appear to distinguish such of these institutions as have already been founded, and the unmistakable leaning of popular sentiment toward such of them as are yet only projected, are dwelt upon, and the National Banking system is shown to be eminently in harmony with them all-therefore to be a measure which fits the times with mathematical precision.

Next as to the incongruity of the State systems. It is claimed that the still prevailing lack of commercial integrity, rendered banking systems, which were exposed to the chicaneries of petty legislatures, and the designs of artful managers, too deficient of proper safeguards for the public upon whom they were to be imposed, to be trusted in. Something more was wanted, even after successive modifications had so improved the State systems that scarcely any of their original features remained. The want of this something more, is contended to be conclusive proof of their incongruity.

Without admitting this conclusion, a glance at the history of State Banking in the United States, would seem to furnish the advocates of National Banking considerable justification for desiring a radical change of system.

In 1784 the first State bank was established in Boston. Since that day bank panics and bank failures have not ceased periodically to afflict the people. In 1814 a suspension of specie payments lasted for three years, and was terminated only by great personal sacrifices. In 1820, and in 1825, bank panics occurred again. In 1837 the entire country was convulsed from end to end by the tremendous financial revulsion occasioned by the rotten systems of the State Banks. Such was the extent of the distress brought upon the country by this memorable crisis, that its calamitous consequences con

tinue to be felt even at this distant day. The sod has not yet grown over all the commercial graves which the universal and desolating bankruptcy of 1837 opened in this country. Following this there were four years of partial suspension. In 1857 the State Banks again stopped payment, and numerous commercial failures ensued. Finally, in 1862, they once more proved themselves to be untrustworthy, by quietly suspending specie payments without even a color of necessity for so doing.* We have had State Banks founded on every conceivable security, good and bad, and they all resulted the same way. In their palmiest days their notes never had more than a strictly local circulation. An Indiana bank-note was worth but ninety-five cents on the dollar in New York, and a Kentucky bank-note but eighty-five cents in Pittsburgh-while the notes of banks located in more remote States would not pass current at the business centres for any price at all. Sometimes they fell to forty or fifty cents on the dollar, and occasionally they rose to par. They were largely counterfeited -it is said that there were five millions of counterfeit State bank-notes in active circulation previous to 1862†—and such was the multiplicity and variety of the designs upon their notes, that counterfeits were frequently impossible to be distinguished from genuine notes, even by experts. Counterfeit bank-note literature had become quite voluminous, We had six or eight semi-weekly periodicals in various parts of the country, exclusively devoted to the detection of counterfeit

The Chemical Bank of New York was an honorable exception.

The notes of over twelve hundred banks have been counterfeited or altered. There are in existence over three thousand kinds of altered notes; seventeen hundred varieties of spurious notes; four hundred and sixty varieties of imitations; and over seven hundred of other kinds; this arising from the great variety of bank notes; there being at a moderate estimate over seven thousand various kinds of genuine bills-some executed by good artists, and many in an indifferent

manner.

The following statistics are from reliable data as to the years 1856 and 1862:

-Senator Sherman, Speech in Congress, Feb. 10, 1863, Cong. Globe, i. 844.

notes and fraudulent bank issues; besides standard works and books of reference without number.

No less than fifteen hundred banks existed in the Northern States. Each of these banks printed on the average five denominations of notes. Each of these notes were printed from different plates. The nature of the securities upon which these notes were issued in the various States was widely different. In order to become familiar with all these circumstances, a great deal of time had to be wasted in studying banking systems, learning to detect counterfeits, and keeping the run of insolvent institutions. But the truth is, that most people took this sort of information upon trust; and thus the whole credit system of the country was thrown into the hands of a clique of publishers, who issued bank-note reporters, and who thus exercised all the authority of Insolvent Court judges.

Without reference to the numerous bank-note frauds, which, under the color of authority, have been time and again committed upon the public, and which are included under the convenient category of "wildcat," it is asserted that from no source whatever, have the people of this country suffered so keenly and so heavily, both socially and pecuniarily, as from the pregnant evil of State Banks: socially, in the reward to rascality which these systems are contended to have virtually offered; and pecuniarily in the heavy losses which their failures are said to have entailed. Shrewd adventurers with a few thousand dollars in their pockets, have contrived to establish and manage banks with capitals of hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was a common thing to establish a bank in some remote locality; then to issue notes based on the required security of State stocks, frequently purchased below par, and with the proceeds of these notes to purchase more stocks, and issue more notes, and soon, ad libitum, until the bubble would burstthe managers drawing interest all the time on the State stocks, and exposing the bill-holders to loss, whenever commercial depression happened to affect the value of the stocks. This system was perfected by keeping the notes in active circulation through brokers and agents in distant business centres, who paid them

out in trade and to workmen and others, at par. Nor had this practice entirely disappeared after the establishment of the Suffolk and Metropolitan Bank systems of redemptions and clearings. Mention is made of individuals-owners of banks in this State and elsewhere-who ceased not to continue these dishonest practices, until the National Bank notes drove their uncurrent money out of circulation. Not only did they profit by drawing interest on a large capital, obtained as we have seen by a species of fraud, but they derived additional profits from the "shaves" to which, in league with brokers and bankers as unscrupulous as themselves, they compelled those who demanded redemption of their uncurrent notes at business centres, to submit.

What further proof, it is then triumphantly asked, is deemed necessary to establish the endemical nature of the National system, and the exotic character of the State systems? What says popular opinion, the embodiment of popular progress? Congress has voted for the National Banking system over and over again; the courts have upheld it; the press is in favor of it; and the people clamor for National Bank notes in preference to any other.

By these and kindred arguments not only are all Constitutional objections to the National Banking system swept away, but by gauging it and its rival system by their relative congruity with the present stage of social progress in this country, it is seen to harmonize more perfectly than the other with the various governmental institutions that surround the people.

The friends of progress are told not to take alarm at this necessary defiance of organic law.* Everything is going aright. Everything will be respected which proves to

But there are not wanting those who find Constitutional authority to tax the State banks out of existence. By the provisions of that instrument, which interdicted the emission of bills of credit by individual States, it is contended to be a fair inference that the States were to permit no banking institutions to issue circulating money or otherwise they might seriously impair the National resources, at times when they were most needed. That having done so, they did so not indeed in violation of the letter of the Constitution, but of its spirit, and therefore that their existence was only due to the forbearance of the general government. This being the case, the government possesses the right to destroy them by any means it chooses, not only by taxing them immoderately, but by peremptorily shutting them up if it deemed proper.-(Mansfield, § 246-249.)

be sufficiently congruous. There has been no union of Church and State, no religious persecutions, no religious disabilities, no law of primogeniture, and, in the midst of an era of paper money, no restraint placed upon the exportation of gold. All this shows that the Constitution, where it has not been too radical, has been duly respected. Where it has not been radical enough for the age, it has even been exceeded. Within a year or two an entire race of men has been raised from a condition of slavery to one of freedom. What more do we want? Is it general legislation? We have it. General incorporating acts have been enacted in many of the States. Mining and manufacturing associations, steamship lines, and insurance companies, are, to a considerable degree, freed from the control of legislation. The world has not stood still. Mankind has not retrograded. But in innovating "it is well to beware that it be the reformation which draweth on the change, and not the desire of change that pretendeth the reformation."

Not content with quoting Bacon, they drag in Herbert Spencer, and progress is actually sought to be felled by a weapon taken from the hands of its greatest living champion.*

As a currency measure the National Banking system finds additional support. First of all it is contended that as credit mobilizes and utilizes wealth, that while labor is the soil, credit is the sunshine which enables every grain of wealth to blossom into fruits of untold value, it follows that the more we have of it, the better.

If, therefore, credit is removed from the limited sphere it occupies in the State Banking systems and transplanted into that more extended and commanding one which it would occupy in the National system, endorsed as it is by the government, and fully confided in by the people, the same amount of currency which would effect a given number of transactions under one system, would effect a greater number under the other.

"The most carefully framed Constitutions are worthless, unless they be embodiments of the popular character, and governmental arrangements in advance of the time, will inevitably lapse into congruity with the time."—(Herbert Spencer : Essay on Railway Morals and Railway Policy.)