may operate in furnishing
a currency.

I can not forego the occasion to urge its importance to the credit of
the Government in a financial point of view. The great necessity of
resorting to every proper and becoming expedient in order to place the
Treasury on a footing of the highest respectability is entirely obvious.
The credit of the Government may be regarded as the very soul of the
Government itself--a principle of vitality without which all its
movements are languid and all its operations embarrassed. In this spirit
the Executive felt itself bound by the most imperative sense of duty
to submit to Congress at its last session the propriety of making a
specific pledge of the land fund as the basis for the negotiation of
the loans authorized to be contracted. I then thought that such an
application of the public domain would without doubt have placed at the
command of the Government ample funds to relieve the Treasury from the
temporary embarrassments under which it labored. American credit has
suffered a considerable shock in Europe from the large indebtedness
of the States and the temporary inability of some of them to meet the
interest on their debts. The utter and disastrous prostration of the
United States Bank of Pennsylvania had contributed largely to increase
the sentiment of distrust by reason of the loss and ruin sustained by
the holders of its stock, a large portion of whom were foreigners and
many of whom were alike ignorant of our political organization and of
our actual responsibilities.

It was the anxious desire of the Executive that in the effort to
negotiate the loan abroad the American negotiator might be able to
point the money lender to the fund mortgaged for the redemption of
the principal and interest of any loan he might contract, and thereby
vindicate the Government from all suspicion of bad faith or inability to
meet its engagements. Congress differed from the Executive in this view
of the subject. It became, nevertheless, the duty of the Executive to
resort to every expedient in its power to do so.

After a failure in the American market a citizen of high character
and talent was sent to Europe, with no better success; and thus the
mortifying spectacle has been presented of the inability of this
Government to obtain a loan so small as not in the whole to amount to
more than one-fourth of its ordinary annual income, at a time when the
Governments of Europe, although involved in debt and w