ch are ready at
our hands.

It would be to our everlasting reproach, it would be placing us below
the general level of the intelligence of civilized states, to admit that
we cannot contrive means to enjoy the benefits of bank circulation, and
of avoiding, at the same time, its dangers. Indeed, Sir, no contrivance
is necessary. It is _contrivance_, and the love of contrivance, that
spoil all. We are destroying ourselves by a remedy which no evil called
for. We are ruining perfect health by nostrums and quackery. We have
lived hitherto under a well constructed, practical, and beneficial
system; a system not surpassed by any in the world; and it seems to me
to be presuming largely, largely indeed, on the credulity and
self-denial of the people, to rush with such sudden and impetuous haste
into new schemes and new theories, to overturn and annihilate all that
we have so long found useful.

Our system has hitherto been one in which paper has been circulating on
the strength of a specie basis; that is to say, when every bank-note was
convertible into specie at the will of the holder. This has been our
guard against excess. While banks are bound to redeem their bills by
paying gold and silver on demand, and are at all times able to do this,
the currency is safe and convenient. Such a currency is not paper money,
in its odious sense. It is not like the Continental paper of
Revolutionary times; it is not like the worthless bills of banks which
have suspended specie payments. On the contrary, it is the
representative of gold and silver, and convertible into gold and silver
on demand, and therefore answers the purposes of gold and silver; and so
long as its credit is in this way sustained, it is the cheapest, the
best, and the most convenient circulating medium. I have already
endeavored to warn the country against irredeemable paper; against the
paper of banks which do not pay specie for their own notes; against that
miserable, abominable, and fraudulent policy, which attempts to give
value to any paper, of any bank, one single moment longer than such
paper is redeemable on demand in gold and silver. I wish most solemnly
and earnestly to repeat that warning. I see danger of that state of
things ahead. I see imminent danger that a portion of the State banks
will stop specie payments. The late measure of the Secretary, and the
infatuation with which it seems to be supported, tend directly and
strongly to that result. Under preten