Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/344

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BANKING.


are natural enemies. Whenever any member of the family of artificial interests gets into the camp of the other family, it lets in its comrades, and plunders to the uttermost. Among them, paper stock has been most conspicuous foy such feats. In England, it has allied itself with its kindred, gotten into the camp, and plundered the nation in the last century beyond the magnifying conception of lunacy itself. Above ten hundred millions of pounds sterling are now supposed to be due to loan and bank stock, to which the payments made during a century must he added, to find the amount of which the family of the earth, has been stript by the family of law. In the United States, speculation, as it was called, bought of the family of the earth an hundred millions at one shilling in the pound, and then compelled it to re-purchase it at twenty. This family of the law soon disclosed its affection for its relations, monarchy and aristocracy. Here too bank stock is already annually extracting from the family of the earth, of labour and of property, five times as much as the civil government of the United States costs. Already, like the ancient hierarchy, it pretends that to tax it would be sacrilege. And already, like a tyrant preparing punishment for treason, it has proposed to inflict death upon forgery, where the system of mildness has been carried so far, as to subject murder in the second degree to imprisonment only. Fear for its wealth will induce this branch, like all of the same race, to let in its kindred.

The revival of the charter of the bank of the United States, was denied upon the ground of the political power conveyed by bank stock to the subjects of England; and the highest authority declared in this denial, that less than ten millions of it would invest foreigners with a pernicious portion of such power. Natives will derive still more power from stock, because their whole mass of social rights are enlisted as its ally and partisan. There is no provision in our constitutions, for a legislative conveyance of power by bank stock, either to citizens or foreigners. This decision, and the talents which produced it, proclaimed, that bank