with overgrown capital and exclusive privileges sufficient to enable it
to control the operations of the other banks. Such an institution will
be pregnant with the same evils produced by the Bank of the United
States, although its sphere of action is more confined, and in the State
in which it is chartered the money power will be able to embody its
whole strength and to move together with undivided force to accomplish
any object it may wish to attain. You have already had abundant evidence
of its power to inflict injury upon the agricultural, mechanical, and
laboring classes of society, and over those whose engagements in trade
or speculation render them dependent on bank facilities the dominion of
the State monopoly will be absolute and their obedience unlimited. With
such a bank and a paper currency the money power would in a few years
govern the State and control its measures, and if a sufficient number of
States can be induced to create such establishments the time will soon
come when it will again take the field against the United States and
succeed in perfecting and perpetuating its organization by a charter
from Congress.

It is one of the serious evils of our present system of banking that it
enables one class of society--and that by no means a numerous one--by
its control over the currency, to act injuriously upon the interests
of all the others and to exercise more than its just proportion of
influence in political affairs. The agricultural, the mechanical, and
the laboring classes have little or no share in the direction of the
great moneyed corporations, and from their habits and the nature of
their pursuits they are incapable of forming extensive combinations to
act together with united force. Such concert of action may sometimes be
produced in a single city or in a small district of country by means of
personal communications with each other, but they have no regular or
active correspondence with those who are engaged in similar pursuits
in distant places; they have but little patronage to give to the press,
and exercise but a small share of influence over it; they have no crowd
of dependents about them who hope to grow rich without labor by their
countenance and favor, and who are therefore always ready to execute
their wishes. The planter, the farmer, the mechanic, and the laborer all
know that their success depends upon their own industry and economy, and
that they must not expect to become suddenly ri