s, these bills
would make their way, and supplant the unfunded paper of their banks,
by their solidity, by the universality of their currency, and by their
receivability for customs and taxes. It would be in their power, too, to
curtail those banks to the amount of their actual specie, by gathering
up their paper, and running it constantly on them. The national paper
might thus take place even in the non-complying States. In this way, I
am not without a hope, that this great, this sole resource for loans
in an agricultural country, might yet be recovered for the use of the
nation during war: and, if obtained in perpetuum, it would always be
sufficient to carry us through any war; provided, that, in the interval
between war and war, all the outstanding paper should be called in,
coin be permitted to flow in again, and to hold the field of circulation
until another war should require its yielding place again to the
national medium.

But it will be asked, are we to have no banks? Are merchants and
others to be deprived of the resource of short accommodations, found
so convenient? I answer, let us have banks: but let them be such as are
alone to be found in any country on earth, except Great Britain. There
is not a bank of discount on the continent of Europe (at least there was
not one when I was there), which offers any thing but cash in exchange
for discounted bills. No one has a natural right to the trade of a
money-lender, but he who has the money to lend. Let those then among us,
who have a monied capital, and who prefer employing it in loans rather
than otherwise, set up banks, and give cash or national bills for the
notes they discount. Perhaps, to encourage them, a larger interest than
is legal in the other cases might be allowed them, on the condition of
their lending for short periods only. It is from Great Britain we copy
the idea of giving paper in exchange for discounted bills: and while we
have derived from that country some good principles of government and
legislation, we unfortunately run into the most servile imitation of all
her practices, ruinous as they prove to her, and with the gulph yawning
before us into which those very practices are precipitating her. The
unlimited emission of bank-paper has banished all her specie, and is
now, by a depreciation acknowledged by her own statesmen, carrying her
rapidly to bankruptcy, as it did France, as it did us, and will do us
again, and every country permitting