likely a thing as to adopt it,
would not become unconstitutional also, if it should so happen that his
successor should hold his bank in as light esteem as he holds those
established under the auspices of Washington and Madison?

If the reasoning of the message be well founded, it is clear that the
charter of the existing bank is not a law. The bank has no legal
existence; it is not responsible to government; it has no authority to
act; it is incapable of being an agent; the President may treat it as a
nullity to-morrow, withdraw from it all the public deposits, and set
afloat all the existing national arrangements of revenue and finance.
It is enough to state these monstrous consequences, to show that the
doctrine, principles, and pretensions of the message are entirely
inconsistent with a government of laws. If that which Congress has
enacted, and the Supreme Court has sanctioned, be not the law of the
land, then the reign of law has ceased, and the reign of individual
opinion has already begun.

The President, in his commentary on the details of the existing bank
charter, undertakes to prove that one provision, and another provision,
is not necessary and proper; because, as he thinks, the same objects
proposed to be accomplished by them might have been better attained in
another mode; and therefore such provisions are not necessary, and so
not warranted by the Constitution. Does not this show, that, according
to his own mode of reasoning, his _own_ scheme would not be
constitutional, since another scheme, which probably most people would
think a better one, might be substituted for it? Perhaps, in any bank
charter, there may be no provisions which may be justly regarded as
absolutely indispensable; since it is probable that for any of them some
others might be substituted. No bank, therefore, ever could be
established; because there never has been, and never could be, any
charter, of which every provision should appear to be indispensable, or
necessary and proper, in the judgment of every individual. To admit,
therefore, that there may be a constitutional bank, and yet to contend
for such a mode of judging of its provisions and details as the message
adopts, involves an absurdity. Any charter which may be framed may be
taken up, and each power conferred by it successively denied, on the
ground, that, in regard to each, either no such power is "necessary or
proper" in a bank, or, which is the same thing in effect, so