public policy.

Under the pernicious workings of this combined system of measures the
country witnessed alternate seasons of temporary apparent prosperity,
of sudden and disastrous commercial revulsions, of unprecedented
fluctuation of prices and depression of the great interests of
agriculture, navigation, and commerce, of general pecuniary suffering,
and of final bankruptcy of thousands. After a severe struggle of more
than a quarter of a century, the system was overthrown.

The bank has been succeeded by a practical system of finance, conducted
and controlled solely by the Government. The constitutional currency has
been restored, the public credit maintained unimpaired even in a period
of a foreign war, and the whole country has become satisfied that banks,
national or State, are not necessary as fiscal agents of the Government.
Revenue duties have taken the place of the protective tariff. The
distribution of the money derived from the sale of the public lands has
been abandoned and the corrupting system of internal improvements, it is
hoped, has been effectually checked.

It is not doubted that if this whole train of measures, designed to take
wealth from the many and bestow it upon the few, were to prevail the
effect would be to change the entire character of the Government. One
only danger remains. It is the seductions of that branch of the system
which consists in internal improvements, holding out, as it does,
inducements to the people of particular sections and localities to
embark the Government in them without stopping to calculate the
inevitable consequences. This branch of the system is so intimately
combined and linked with the others that as surely as an effect is
produced by an adequate cause, if it be resuscitated and revived and
firmly established it requires no sagacity to foresee that it will
necessarily and speedily draw after it the reestablishment of a national
bank, the revival of a protective tariff, the distribution of the land
money, and not only the postponement to the distant future of the
payment of the present national debt, but its annual increase.

I entertain the solemn conviction that if the internal-improvement
branch of the "American system" be not firmly resisted at this time the
whole series of measures composing it will be speedily reestablished and
the country be thrown back from its present high state of prosperity,
which the existing policy has produced, and be destined aga