xtraordinary extension and
contraction of its accommodations to the community, its corrupt and
partisan loans, its exclusion of the public directors from a knowledge
of its most important proceedings, the unlimited authority conferred on
the president to expend its funds in hiring writers and procuring the
execution of printing, and the use made of that authority, the retention
of the pension money and books after the selection of new agents, the
groundless claim to heavy damages in consequence of the protest of the
bill drawn on the French Government, have through various channels been
laid before Congress. Immediately after the close of the last session
the bank, through its president, announced its ability and readiness to
abandon the system of unparalleled curtailment and the interruption of
domestic exchanges which it had practiced upon from the 1st of August,
1833, to the 30th of June, 1834, and to extend its accommodations to
the community. The grounds assumed in this annunciation amounted to an
acknowledgment that the curtailment, in the extent to which it had been
carried, was not necessary to the safety of the bank, and had been
persisted in merely to induce Congress to grant the prayer of the bank
in its memorial relative to the removal of the deposits and to give it
a new charter. They were substantially a confession that all the real
distresses which individuals and the country had endured for the
preceding six or eight months had been needlessly produced by it,
with the view of affecting through the sufferings of the people the
legislative action of Congress. It is a subject of congratulation
that Congress and the country had the virtue and firmness to bear the
infliction, that the energies of our people soon found relief from this
wanton tyranny in vast importations of the precious metals from almost
every part of the world, and that at the close of this tremendous effort
to control our Government the bank found itself powerless and no longer
able to loan out its surplus means. The community had learned to manage
its affairs without its assistance, and trade had already found new
auxiliaries, so that on the 1st of October last the extraordinary
spectacle was presented of a national bank more than one-half of whose
capital was either lying unproductive in its vaults or in the hands of
foreign bankers.

To the needless distresses brought on the country during the last
session of Congress has since been adde