their wars; each brings, and, if it be necessary, sacrifices all he has, and lays down his life for the defence of his home. One half of us hail a war with delight, because plenty of money will be borrowed and squandered among us, leaving the children and the unborn to pay and to suffer the consequences. Paine says, though he contradicts himsel. in almost every paragraph, but in this he is right, that generations are every day both commencing and expiring.' This, I say, is true, and all the rest about the age of generations is resorted to only to reconcile to us the villanies of democratic or rather demagogue governments, and to sanction their 'right' to do wrong and plunder the people in various ways.

In his defence of the bank charter against repeal, he says that, "When we violate a charter, we assume a right that belongs to the next generation." . . . "We, who made it," says he, " have not that right." Well, what does the man mean by the next generation? Does he mean according to Jefferson's first standard, thirty-four years, or his last, nineteen years, or to some other of his intermediate standards? or does he mean according to his own definition of the matter-to wit, one day? What nonsense this man has been obliged to resort to in defending this charter! If the people repealed it, it was an unjustifiable act and a violation on their part. That it might, however, be done by the next generation, which, before, he told us would commence the very next day and if he had said the next moment he would have been near the fact, though still not correct, for since Adam we hear of no beginning or ending in these matters. We speak of generations, and so do the Scriptures, but it is only figuratively.

I remember seeing, at the fairs, among other wonderful sights, when I was a boy, a mill for grinding old people young. There were the old ones going down on one side of the hopper, and the young ones coming up on the other. When we had had our penny-worth, and the mill stopped, there would be an old one half gone down, and a young one half come up; so that we could not distinguish a perfect generation, even with the advantage of being able to stop the machinery, a power which we do not possess in the case before us. Our machinery is like the sun, "it never tires nor stops to rest." "Man fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continues in one stay; in the midst of life he is in death; he cometh up green in the morning and is cut down like a flower, dried up and withered before night." What folly, then, to talk of one generation having a right to do this, and another that; of what may be done for thirty-four years, nineteen years, or any other length of time! What is right and just with respect to generations to-day was the same yesterday, will be the same to-morrow and for ever. But, since the chartering, swindling system grew up among us, the time of the

"morbid and restless" governments is wholly taken up in "legalising speculation on the people," as Governor Wolf has it. Their vitiated anxiety for establishing corporations and conferring exclusive privileges causes them to be for ever altering and amending their infernal schemes; and they thus cheat us out of our property and our understanding also. When I commenced examining this pamphlet, I had no idea of my remarks extending thus far; but the strange absurdities and contradictions contained in it come one after another so rapidly, that, long as this letter is, it is not one half long enough to notice the whole of them. They seemed, however, absurd as they are, to demand more attention from me than they would appear at first sight to deserve; for they are the self-same doctrines which have been used from the foundation of democracies to the present day, to delude the people into the belief that they alone have sovereign power; or, in other words, that they are collectively and individually, " sovereigns." Every one who has been in the United States must be aware how much these absurd and selfcontradictory phrases are made use of by the designing demagogues, who, in conjunction with the usurers and their instruments-corrupt mobs-are in fact the real governors of the United States, if the anarchy which does and must, in the nature of things, spring from so foul a source, can be called a government at all.

But, to return to Paine's defence of chartered banks; that is to say, of banks the proprietors of which are not individually liable to take up their own notes, or, in other words, to pay their own debts.

For the writing of this pamphlet, I think there can be no doubt, the author was paid by the bankers of that day. They knew that his "Common Sense" had found its way into every hut in the country, and they thought that anything further from him would be well received. But the doctrines he used to serve his employers were of the most extraordinary kind; and most extraordinary it is that the descendants of those employers should be so void of understanding as to republish a work which shows clearly that their profession is the basest of the base. One would suppose that the bank used nothing but gold and silver, when its advocate says that "the evils of paper money have no end; that it is continually creating now scenes of deceit; that it dissolves the band of society; that the suppression of it ought to be put into the act for preventing vice and immorality; that it will banish specie till we have none left; that, of all the various sorts of base coin, paper-money is the basest; that paper-money, in any light it can be viewed, is, at best, a bubble; that nature has provided materials for money, gold and silver, and any attempt of ours to rival her is ridiculous." Always alluding to the State's paper-money, and always in favour of bank-notes, convertible, as he said, into specie.

A most curious way this of supporting paper-money makers. He speaks too of tender-laws, or laws to force you to receive bits of paper, instead of gold and silver, for money owing you; and he says that the punishment of any member who moves for such a law ought to be death!!! Again he says that no law can warrant the doing of an unlawful act; therefore, the proper mode of proceeding would be, to impeach and execute any member who moved for and seconded such a bill; that men ought to be made to tremble at the idea of such a barefaced act of injustice.

A most curious way this of supporting bankers, whom we know in May last forced upon us a tender; not by law! but, what is infinitely worse, in defiance of law; and the governor of Pennsylvania highly approves of their conduct, and says that "the banks, (still suspended) have well sustained themselves through the crisis." And, further, he says, that "the infliction of the penalty would be productive of more evil to the community than a continuance of the suspension." There were at least twenty thousand men met in Philadelphia a few days after this suspension, or, to speak more properly, after the general confiscation of the people's property for the use and enjoyment of the "morbid and restless rogues, who would be impeached and executed if justice were done:" these twenty thousand plundered men demanded justice, in words as clear and as strong as could be found in the English language. Yet this governor officially informs us that our conduct with respect to the banks "is a remarkable instance of the virtual repeal of a general law of the land, by the expressive but silent action of public necessity." If he had said that there is no justice nor law of the land, that cannot be set aside by the will of the bankers, he would have spoken the truth. It is well known to be almost as much as a man's life is worth, and more than his business is worth, for him to demand gold and silver either for notes, for mortgages, bonds, or anything else.

It was but the other day that a bank attorney before a magistrate had the hardihood and impudence to threaten me with imprisonment if I dared again to bring a suit against his bank employers for the payment of their notes in specie, they having stuck up in their bank a notice that no more specie would there be paid, and that notice, he said, was all-sufficient.

There is scarcely another man but myself in this community, aggrieved as they are, that stands firmly against these insolent tyrants. Surely, "God, has delivered us to the ungodly, and turned us over into the hands of the wicked."

Paine pretended to think that the bank was "an institutiton capable of being made exceedingly beneficial.....because its notes were promissory notes, payable on demand, and might be taken to the bank

and exchanged for gold or silver, without the least ceremony or difficulty."

As to the ceremony, it is now indescribable; a further account of which I have given in another letter. If your note be for five dollars, and the bank has got as much in its vaults, by giving it as a fee to a lawyer you may perhaps recover it; after half a dozen hearings before a magistrate, and after having been abused by a bank lawyer, and called everything that the vile slanderer can rake together-after this and a thousand other "ceremonies," if you can find a magistrate that is not lost to all shame, and if your note be for five dollars, mind, you may get it; but, if it be for above five dollars, then there is no hope whatever. A friend of mine, a poor man, sued the United States Bank in May last, for the payment of a ten-dollar note. He got judgment against the bankers; but they carried it to a higher court!! where it now remains, and the man's lawyer tells him that they can keep it there as long as they please. So that he has been deprived of the use of his ten dollars for nine months already, and has his own lawyer to pay besides, together with loss of time, and so on. These are only a part of the ceremonies and difficulties, as I have already shown. You are, no doubt, as much surprised at the ignorance of Paine, in relation to banks, as he affected to be at the ignorance of the committee when they foretold all these things. You use his language, and ask if it is possible for that man to have been so ignorant as not to have known that that bank was conceived in sin; and that, if it were not killed in its infancy, it would cover the face of the country with evil? So prolific are banks, that in fifty years they have increased from one to one thousand!! besides the myriads of shin-plaster shops, a sort of bastard litter, and of the corporations of every kind-all the lineal descendants of that bank which was so highly approved of by this author of "Common Sense," of "The Rights of Man," and, above all things, "The Age of Reason."

I remain yours most respectfully,

THOMAS BROTHERS.

P.S. You will notice that Paine says, that the legislators cannot break contracts made by former legislators; but, when it serves his purpose to do so, he tells us "that no assembly can even engage that the next assembly shall receive their notes in payment of taxes!! " What will our city and country authorites think of this? They, who are possessed of inferior powers, have engaged that their unlawful emission of, perhaps, a million of dollars, for sums, some of them as low as five-cent notes, shall be redeemed by their successors!!!-And this pestilential rubbish, the sight of which, the touch of which, nor the

smell of which, cannot be endured by a decent person, is to be held by us, according to Paine, by the dignified title of "hostage!!" until exchanged for hard money. How long it will be before it is ransomed, and restored to the embraces of its unhappy progenitors, no one seems to have the least idea.

He recommends the combining the security of the government and the bank into one, and says the bank-notes would then be doubly secured; though before he told us "that one assembly cannot even engage that the next assembly shall receive its notes in payment of taxes!!" If such a union would double the security, the single security must have been of a very flimsy nature.

T. B.