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shewn that whether a bank charter shall be repealed, is not a question for the federal judiciary, on the plea of contract, but altogether and merely matter of State policy. All the banks of Pennsylvania, except one, hold their charters by express provision in them, that if it shall appear that the charters and privileges are injurious to the citizens of this Commonwealth, the legislature reserve full power to alter, revoke and annul them at any time. It is the statute law of Pennsylvania that no company, incorporated by the laws of any other of the United States, shall be permit ted to establish within this Commonwealth any banking house or office of discount and deposite: and all bank notes under five dollars, between five and ten, ten and twenty, and twenty and fifty dollars, are prohibited by penalties enacted posterior to the bank charters. The whole regulation of banking is thus within legislative action, applied occasionally contrary to Judge Hopkinson's denial of legislative authority over bank charters, excepting one bank. Mr. Dallas' suggestion of the mode of proceeding with that bank has been denounced with great severity; by no one of this convention more than Mr. Stevens. But I shall shew, finally, that he is the originator of Mr. Dallas' destructive doctrine, as Mr. Stevens calls it, and that the only bank whose charter is not, by the charter, revocable, owes its creation to an attempt by Mr. Stevens and others to place it, for illicit and selfish purposes, beyond the law.

By the private journal of the House of Representatives for 1835-'6, volume 2d, page 204, report No. 45, made on the 6th January, 1836, it is stated by the report of the Judiciary Committee, relative to the incorporation of the Wrightsville, York and Gettysburg Railroad Company, which report was made by Mr. Stevens, that an act of the legislature incorporating that company had been carried, through mistake or fraud, whereupon the committee declare that they entertain no doubt of the power of the legislature to repeal the law, and declare void the charter obtained by such palpable fraud and imposition. To permit such fraud to prevail, and the authors to take advantage from it, either to themselves or their constituents, would be a reproach upon legislation, and an encouragement to dishonor and dishonesty. The Committee, therefore, unanimously recommend the passage of a law compelling the company to complete the railway to Gettysburg, as was originally intended by the House; or if they should refuse to do so, repealing the law by which said company was incorporated, and declaring the charter null and void. They accordingly report a bill. So that Mr. Stevens was the practical expounder of the destructive doctrine which he denounces in Mr. Dallas.

The cases are precisely the same, identical, for all the purposes of my argument. A law passed incorporating a company, which, I understand, was accepted and acted on by the corporators. On the allegation of fraud, with little more proof than Mr. Stevens' declaration, on honor, that act was repealed, the charter recalled, the corporators compelled to change it fundamentally, at a ruinous loss; in short, every suggestion of Mr. Dallas' much abused letter was carried into effect at Mr. Stevens' instance, by subsequent act of the legislature resuming the vested rights of a chartered association. It was not a public object, like a bank, but private. The ground alleged was fraud; fraud in only one member of the legislature, who, on oath, denied the fraud imputed to him on Mr. Stevens' honor only. I am not to be understood as affirming that a subsequent legislature, on such premises, should re

scind their predecessor's act; still less as adopting Mr. Stevens' unwarrantable position of imputed fraud in a single member, on the statement, on honor, of another member directly interested in the issue, and, by recrimination, implicated himself in the fraud, is adequate proof of fraud; least of all as subscribing to the palpable injustice of this flagrant violation. All I use it for is its aptitude, recency and force, as a precedent, to show what the Legislature of this State has lately done, and considers it may do, in such cases. In all respects it is the very case of the Bank of the United States, as put by Mr. Dallas, with no difference except that the act of repeal was a much stronger exercise of authority in the instance of the railroad, even supposing the fraud proved, than any such act can be in that of the bank.

In closing this long and arduous effort, I am not insensible of its temerity, and fully aware that the task is beyond my powers. To broach the subject with independence, as becomes an American, is all the good I can do; the intelligence of the community will accomplish the rest. Not long ago it was very generally apprehended that a bank charter is a contract, and probably most of the members of a learned profession acquiesced in the whole contract doctrine dictated by one of its most respectable heads, which I have venutured to call in question, and which I have good reason to believe a very large portion of the intelligence of the community, including that learned profession, is already disposed to reject as an untenable dogma; not from the force of my reasoning,-my only merit is to have called the attention of superior minds to the inquiry. It was impossible to confront honest and respectable prejudice, as I have ventured to do, without incurring obloquy. Many sincere and worthy persons really dread every independent denial of partially established opinions, and especially deprecate what they deem irreverent contradiction of merely judicial say-so's. Many others, insincere, interested, and frequently infamous, sticklers for what they clamor as vested rights, are outrageous in denouncing the alledged heresy of questioning them. Towards the former I cherish every respect; the latter I put at defiance. Every candid hearer or reader of whatever sentiments I have uttered on this subject, must acknowledge that my object has continually been to affirm and even enlarge judicial authority as the sheet anchor of order and happiness, to protect property with scrupulous regard to all its rights, to confine the continually overflowing power of legislation within constitutional channels, but within those channels to sustain its current, to maintain and, if possible, gradually and cautiously to improve constitutions, as experience teaches, and to inculcate, on all occasions, that there can be no rational liberty without the empire of law.

Interested and passionate idolatry has taken charge of banks as if all their properties were sacro-sanct. Their ground seems to be sacred, while the air their questioners breathe is full of daggers. Grave and authoritative members of this Convention have treated this subject in a manner that is surprising. A gentleman so intelligent as Mr. Sill, ascribed most of the liberty and improvements of modern civilization to corporations. Mr. Forward, going one step further, gave banks the credit of those advantages. Mr. Sergeant, further still, awarded it to paper money. Judge Hopkinson considers federalism, now reviving, the great impulse of all good government, including, I suppose, that second birth of federalism, like the Governor's, whose eleven commandments, as they have been rather profanely called, strike blows at

banks far too radical for my notions of regulation. Mr. Forward, whose letter to the people of Allegheny county recommended him to their suffrages, by denouncing excessive banking, actually pronounced an encomium, almost one by one, upon the directors of all the banks of Pennsylvania, contrasting their highly extolled virtues with the much contemned vices of politicians courting the people. That respectable gentleman must excuse my saying, that a more generous and, I have no doubt, a more profitable exercise of either professional or representative talents, would con sist in just and temperate condemnation of law-breaking institutions, of which I have been accused of saying, what Mr. Denny said before me, that the administration of justice stands still and powerless before them. When a report was introduced in this Convention, last summer, by a minority of the Committee on the Currency, it was not suffered to be printed; since when, it has been published in almost every newspaper from the Penobscot to the Balize, its sentiments generally adopted, at least in theory, and Governors of many States have pressed their practical enactment upon Legislatures. Not the destruction of banks, but their regulation, with acknowledgment of their vicious system and practice, is the sentiment of all but an exclusive few, who still persist in imputing to credit and paper what is due to liberty and labor. A large majority of American presses now sanction the doctrines of a report, which, a few months ago, was decried in this assembly as a fire-brand, but is now ratified even in this benighted city. The voice of the people is not in harmony with the cry of banks. I did not wait for Presidential permission, but before the Chief Magistrate, by his recommendation, involved this topic in the delirium of politics, the report of the committee which I allude to was with deference submitted through this body to public judgment, and that judgment has exceeded my most sanguine anticipations. In States and places where, what Judge Hopkinson might call federalism, prevails, despite of party influences, the supremacy of laws, and subordination of banks, have been sanctioned by constituted authorities. The good sense of the country at large perceives and insists that regulation and limitation are not destruction, and that when evils are ascertained inconsistent with the pnblic good, repeal of bank charters is no violation of property. Increase of coin and decrease of paper circulation are actually effected, so far as public opinion can do it. Separation of banking business from affairs of State remains to be accomplished by law, while a fortunate convulsion has established it in fact. The last and greatest consummation, repealing bank charters by act of assembly, must soon follow as a principle, the adoption of which is indispensable. Bank idolatry and professional bigotry have heretofore covered it with mystification and difficulties; but the very agitation of the question has fixed its destiny. Control of the currency, without which a State is held in bondage by banks, absolute control, free from all judicial interposition or federal restraint, is the greatest need of States, towards which the good sense of the community is rapidly tending. Far from divesting vested rights, or disparaging judicial authority, it is in harmony with all the principles of good government.

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The November Number of our Review contained our opinions on this subject at considerable length, in connexion with two remarkable disclosures of the ultimate designs of the Philadelphia papermoney speculators, viz. the unlucky letter of Mr. Biddle, of the 5th of April last, and Mr. Carey's adroit attempt at defending its principles, under the title of "The Credit System of France, Great Britain and the United States." Our readers we hope will not regard our recurrence to this topic as unwelcome, since nothing can be so vitally essential to the public welfare, as the equal and substantial value of the measure by which all contracts are settled, and every description of property estimated, amidst the infinite variety of interchange which necessarily occurs in all civilized communities.

The attempts which have been recently made, to create a necessity similar to that of the deplorable state of affairs under which the public finances were formerly compelled to be surrendered to the practical control of private and irresponsible individuals, have not only subjected our political institutions to severe trials, but have ruthlessly destroyed the property and prospects of thousands of industrious and worthy citizens. But neither the gigantic speculations excited in 1835 and 1836, nor their issue, the total banishment of sound currency from circulation in 1837, have effected the object designed. To secure its eventual accomplishment, an entire change in the tactics of the warfare which has been unremittingly waged against the political rights of the people and the security of their permanent interests, appears to have lately taken place. The vigilance and firmness of the responsible public officers elected by the people to execute the laws having baffled the deeply laid measures concerted by the paper-money speculators, they have now undertaken to subvert the principles of justice and equal rights among the people themselves. The exhibition of their self-sufficient im

portance, and contempt for the people-the promulgation of opin ions that the people are their own worst enemies, and in the man agement of important affairs are unworthy of regard and confidencehaving failed, we now find these unwearied schemers professing a degree of subservience to the unrestrained cupidity of every individual in the community which exposes the rights of property to universal overthrow. We now see the devisers and supporters of the monopoly scheme of paper currency, to be alone by law re ceivable into the public treasury, boldly asserting the unqualified right of the whole people to manufacture paper currency which shall be received in all payments. We now witness the projectors and advocates of a tariff policy which levied heavy burdens upon those whom the fluctuations of a monopoly paper currency could not directly reach, by imposing en enormous tax upon articles of prime necessity entering into the consumption of every individual in the community, becoming all at once the great champions of free trade, and denouncing all shackles upon productive industry, and especially that most important and substantial protection afforded by a sound and equal measure of value. In short the mischievous anarchical doctrines by which the whole property of the country is now proposed to be brought into jeopardy with a design to produce the necessity for the reconstruction of the great monopoly paper-coining machine, which shall exercise irresponsible control over the American people and their institutions of government, manifests a far greater want of respect for the discernment and good sense of the community at large, than the denunciations of the "swinish multitude" at a former period.

The most elaborate and insidious appeal to the insurgent passions of unreflecting men that we have happened to meet with, appeared at the commencement of the present year, in a work recently established by the Whig party near the federal seat of government, in professed rivalry and opposition to the Democratic Review,-in the guise of a reply to our former Article, from the pen of Mr. Carey. During the prostrated condition of practical morality in England through the operation of the South-Sea scheme and the other gambling speculations of that era of bubbles, Mandeville published his famous treatise to prove that private vices were public benefits. The book being written with talent and ingenuity excited great alarm among the sober and religious portions of the community.After the usual fashion of former days, instead of shewing the falacy of its doctrines, those who considered them to be dangerous prosecuted the publishers for endeavouring to subvert the foundations of society. This brought the work into general notice, and gave the author an opportunity of publishing his vindication, in which he undertook to show that the tendency of his doctrines was beneficial to society, since the excesses of men must inevitably

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