almost as well have remained in
the mine from whence it had been extracted. It was still in the
country, but had all been absorbed by the agriculturists; and such will
ever be the case in a widely extended agricultural country. The
farmers, principally Dutch, live upon a portion of their produce and
sell the rest. Formerly they were content with bank bills or Mexican
dollars, which they laid by for a rainy day, and they remained locked up
for years before they were required. When the gold was issued, it was
eagerly collected by these people, as more convenient, and laid by, by
the farmers' wives, in the foot of an old worsted stocking, where the
major part of it will remain. And thus has the famous gold-currency
bill been upset by the hoarding propensities of a parcel of old women.
[See note 2.]

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Note 1. One single proof may be given of the ruinous policy of the
Jackson administration in temporising with the credit of the country.
To check the export of bullion from our country, the Bank of England had
but one remedy, that of rendering money scarce: they contracted their
issues, and it became so. The consequence was, that the price of cotton
fell forty dollars per bale. The crop of cotton amounted to 1,600,000
bales, which, at forty dollars per bale, was a loss to the southern
planters of 64,000,000 of dollars.

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Note 2. A curious proof of this system of hoarding, which immediately
took place upon the bank stopping payment, was told me by a gentleman
from Baltimore. He went into a store to purchase, as he often had done,
a canvas shot-bag, and to his surprise was asked three times the former
price for it. Upon his expostulating, the vendors told him, that the
demand for them by the farmers and other people who brought their
produce to market, and who used them to put their specie in, was so
great, that they could hardly supply them.

VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER THREE.

Fifty years ago, New York was little more than a village; now, it is a
fine city with three hundred thousand inhabitants. I have never seen
any city so admirably adapted for commerce. It is built upon a narrow
island, between Long Island Sound and the Hudson River, Broadway running
up it like the vertebrae of some huge animal, and the other streets
diverging from it at right angles, like the rib