ances of our own products are likely to make that
payment? What more miserable than to boast of having that which is not
ours, which belongs to others, and which the convenience of others, and
our own convenience also, require that they should possess? If Boston
were in debt to New York, would it be wise in Boston, instead of paying
its debt, to contrive all possible means of obtaining specie from the
New York banks, and hoarding it at home? And yet this, as I think, would
be precisely as sensible as the course which the government of the
United States at present pursues. We have, beyond all doubt, a great
amount of specie in the country, but it does not answer its accustomed
end, it does not perform its proper duty. It neither goes abroad to
settle balances against us, and thereby quiet those who have demands
upon us; nor is it so disposed of at home us to sustain the circulation
to the extent which the circumstances of the times require. A great part
of it is in the Western banks, in the land offices, on the roads through
the wilderness, on the passages over the Lakes, from the land offices to
the deposit banks, and from the deposit banks back to the land offices.
Another portion is in the hands of buyers and sellers of specie; of men
in the West, who sell land-office money to the new settlers for a high
premium Another portion, again, is kept in private hands, to be used
when circumstances shall tempt to the purchase of lands. And, Gentlemen,
I am inclined to think, so loud has been the cry about hard money, and
so sweeping the denunciation of all paper, that private holding, or
hoarding, prevails to some extent in different parts of the country.
These eighty millions of specie, therefore, really do us little good. We
are weaker in our circulation, I have no doubt, our credit is feebler,
money is scarcer with us, at this moment, than if twenty millions of
this specie were shipped to Europe, and general confidence thereby
restored.

Gentlemen, I will not say that some degree of pressure might not have
come upon us, if the treasury order had not issued. I will not say that
there has not been over-trading, and over-production, and a too great
expansion of bank circulation. This may all be so, and the
last-mentioned evil, it was easy to foresee, was likely to happen when
the United States discontinued their own bank. But what I do say is,
that, acting upon the state of things as it actually existed, and is now
actually e