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or violate his oath. Some gentlemen, indeed, on this side, might like the measure on this account; but would the friends of this bill vote for it in this view of its effects?

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They would soon, if no other system was agreed on, begin to reason as on the repeal, that the people had rendered a verdict against specie. Over three fourths of the Union now, and near all of it in 1887-the practice of a majority of the people and of the state legislatures, it will be said, were against specie and pecie circular. The sound sense and strong moral f of the people, in many places, have been deluded and persecuted in favor of depreciated paper. It is not merely a vitiated taste, but gambling speculators have made them believe it is for their interest to have a new paper standard, and not the gold and silver Washington and his compeers sought to introduce and perpetuate.

Let me admonish, then, all who hear me, that concerning the currency to be received for public duties in the new state of affairs, and as to any supposed verdict of the people thereon, if Congress adjourned without providing a substitute for the sub-treasury, it would soon be argued and found that the joint resolution of 1816 was not imperative. Its language was not, that paper of a certain description should be taken, but that it ought to be taken. Yes; it ought. But supposing the secretary could not get it readily, how then? What had been the argument in 1837 on that point? Shinplasters were then current, and what had been called the ten cent rebellion in Boston had been gotten up, because specie was demanded by the collector. The secretary would say he could not get convertible notes, and the verdict of the people was, that in that case he must take depreciated paper. By this state of things, all specie and specie-paying banks must go by the board. Discretion was said to be the law of tyrants; yet now the treasury was to be let loose again, to use, at pleasure, the paper of non-specie-paying banks; and this the secretary, it would be argued, could not avoid, if he respected public opinion.

But it was said that we should soon have a substitute. Some great fiscal agent was to be provided, or else an oldfashioned Bank of the United States. Mr. W. would not

argue that question; with him the time was gone by; but he would ask the members of that Senate whether they were ready to repeal the existing law, to re-establish such an institution as the old Bank of the United States? If they were, very well; but he could not yet tell whether such a plan had been matured and was to be presented. Why not wait till then, and see whether a majority of this body will take an institution instead of a sub-treasury, which has been condemned by most of the democratic fathers of the constitution-which the present President himself concedes has been condemned by the peoplewhich has been condemned by experience as well as reason-which has no power to resist suspensions and enormous losses, and which a few years ago, after becoming better and stronger by a new state charter, and getting rid of a bad partner in the general government, as its chief officer declared, has since blasted the livelihood of thousands of widows and orphans, and, in the opinion of many, covered the whole country with infamy and ruin? Do gentlemen wish to abolish the sub-treasury for such a bank? Do they wish to give congressional sanction at home and abroad to such enormities?

Next: do the west and south-west want the still lower prices, and ruinous sacrifices of property, caused by putting such a bank in operation from 1817 to 1820? Let gentlemen read the history of that era, and they will pause. They are seeking the wrong remedy for the existing disease, as he would hereafter attempt to show on some other occasion. It was said, however, that we were to have a bank that would not be unconstitutional; it was to be free from all objections of that kind. He was glad to hear it but what was the plan? Had not gentlemen better wait till they saw whether it did avoid all constitutional difficulty or not? Surely they would act thus in their own affairs; why not in the affairs of the public? What was this bank to be? If it was to be a mere fiscal agent not incorporated, then it was a government bank; and he said to gentlemen that, by their declarations and opinions, they were abolishing just such a bank, though without the name. All they had to do was to call the sub-treasury a fiscal agent, and the thing would be,

by their reasoning, effected. Was this any thing new? Had not gentlemen contended that the bill of 1840 went to create a treasury bank? Yet they were now for destroying that, only to make another. Here Mr. W. quoted the title of a speech by Mr. CLAY in 1840, which he held in his hand, in which the sub-treasury was denominated a government bank, of which the President of the United States was to be president, cashier, and teller. All they had to do was to give the secretary power to issue small drafts, and the sub-treasury would be a government bank, according to the reasoning of this speech.

Mr. CLAY here interposed to inquire of Mr. W. whether he rightly understood him as now admitting that the sub-treasury was a bank.

Mr. WOODBURY replied in the negative. Your speech had represented it as a bank only under the supposition that the secretary could cut up his drafts into small sums, and use them as bank notes.

Mr. CLAY. Well, and could he not do it?

Mr. WOODBURY. He did not do it. I admit that the argument itself is a fair one, but he did not do it, nor could it have been done without sanction of law; nor was it ever intended to be done, uuless required by Congress to do it.

It would then be only a bank of circulation, but not one of deposit for individuals, nor one of discount at all; which last kind of bank was made, and especially a national one, so open to politic favoritism and corruption.

I will not, on this occasion, detain the Senate longer, and did not intend at this time to say half so much.

DUTIES OF AMERICAN CITIZENS

BY HON. LEVI WOODBURY.

[AN EXTRACT.]

WHILE meditating upon our own astonishing progress, as developed in history, and discriminating with care the origin alike of our perils and securities as a people, does it not behove us to weigh well the importance of our present position? Not our position merely with regard to foreign powers. From them we have, by an early start and rapid progress in the cause of equal rights, long ceased to fear much injury, or to hope for very essential aid, in our further efforts for the thorough improvement of the condition of society in all that is useful or commendable. Nor our position, however the true causes may be distorted or denied our elevated position, in prosperity and honorable estimation, both at home and abroad. But it is our position, so highly responsible, as the only country where the growth of self-government seems fully to have ripened and to have become a model or example to other nations; or, as the case may prove, their scoff and scorn.

To falter here, and now, would, therefore, probably be to cause the experiment of such a government to fail forever. It is not sufficient, in this position, to loathe servitude, or to love liberty with all the enthusiasm of Plutarch's heroes. But we must be warned by our history how to maintain liberty; how to grasp the substance rather than the shadow; to disregard rhetorical flourishes, unless accompanied by deeds; not to be cajoled by holiday finery, or pledges enough to carpet the polls, where integrity and burning zeal do not exist to redeem them; nor to permit ill-vaunting ambition to volunteer and vaunt its professions of ability as well as willingness to serve the people against their own government-any more than demagogues, in a rougher mood, with a view to rob you, sacrilegiously, of those principles, or undermine, with insidious pretensions, those equal institutions which your

fathers bled to secure. Nor does true reform, however frequent in this position, and under those institutions, scarcely ever consist in violence, or what usually amounts to revolution, the sacred right of which, by force or rebellion, in extreme cases of oppression, being seldom necessary to be exercised here, because reform is one of the original elements of those institutions, and one of their great, peaceable, and prescribed objects. However the timid, then, may fear, or the wealthy denounce its progress, it is the principal safety-valve of our system, rather than an explosion to endanger or destroy it. We should also weigh well our delicate position as the sole country whither the discontented in all others resort freely, and, while conforming to the laws, abide securely; and whither the tide of emigration, whether for good or evil, seems each year setting with increased force.

When we reflect on these circumstances, with several others, which leisure does not permit me to enumerate; and when we advert to some of the occurrences in our social and political condition, within the few last years, appearing worse, it is feared, than the slight irregularities and outbreaks of great freedom, on such periodical excitements as elections; and looking rather, in some cases, like more grave departures from legal subordination, and attended, as they have been, on different occasions, and in different quarters, by no feeble indications of obliquity of principle, in morals as well as politics, evinced by violent aggressions, not only on person and property, but the rights of conscience and of free discussion-while we see all this, what does our delicate and peculiar position teach, as to the perils of American liberty? What warning spirit breathes from those events? What inferences should philosophy and our sober judgments draw from their history?

Is it not manifest that the danger now to be guarded against is one arising rather from too little than too much control on the part of the government; too little rather than too much reverence for the constitution, the supremacy of the laws, and the sacredness of personal rights as well as those of property; and if not an undue homage to mere wealth still too great presumptuousness from the

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