ues, when there was good paper and specie in circulation; and the
Baltimore banks, as well as all others, must have followed suit, or
given up the game.

For these reasons we must continue to think, that the claim urged by the
friends of the Bank of the United States, that it operated, by its
example, a salutary coercion on the state banks in their return to
specie payments, is as well established as a question of its character
can be, and that the same means by which it proved that remedy for the
mischiefs of an unsound currency--its solid capital--unquestionable
credit--and practical skill in business--would operate, on future
occasions, as a preventive of similar mischiefs.

The same distinguished critic differs from the chairman of the committee
of ways and means, as to the effect of an increase of money in producing
depreciation. The proposition controverted is thus stated by Mr.
M'Duffie in the Report.

"No proposition is better established than that the value of
money, whether it consists of specie or paper, is depreciated
in exact proportion to the increase of its quantity, in any
given state of the demand for it. If, for example, the banks,
in 1816, doubled the quantity of the circulating medium by
their excessive issues, they produced a general degradation of
the entire mass of the currency, including gold and silver,
proportioned to the redundancy of the issues, and wholly
independent of the relative depreciation of bank paper at
different places as compared with specie. The nominal money
price of every article was of course one hundred per cent.
higher than it would have been, but for the duplication of the
quantity of the circulating medium. Money is nothing more nor
less than the measure by which the relative value of all
articles of merchandise is ascertained. If, when the
circulating medium is fifty millions, an article should cost
one dollar, it would certainly cost two, if, without any
increase of the uses of a circulating medium, its quantity
should be increased to one hundred millions. This rise in the
price of commodities, or depreciation in the value of money, as
compared with them, would not be owing to the want of credit in
the bank bills, of which the currency happened to be composed.
It would exist, though these bills were of undoubted credit,
and convertible into specie a