eople's money being used to pay
the fiddler. No one can doubt that the examination proposed
by this resolution must cost the State some ten or twelve
thousand dollars; and all this to settle a question in
which the people have no interest, and about which they care
nothing. These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in
concert to fleece the people; and now that they have got into
a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate
the people's money to settle the quarrel."

The resolution had declared that the bank practised various methods
which were "to the great injury of the people." Lincoln took the
occasion to announce his ideas of the people and the politicians.

"If the bank really be a grievance, why is it that no one of
the real people is found to ask redress of it? The truth is,
no such oppression exists. If it did, our people would groan
with memorials and petitions, and we would not be permitted
to rest day or night till we had put it down. The people know
their rights, and they are never slow to assert and
maintain them when they are invaded. Let them call for an
investigation, and I shall ever stand ready to respond to the
call. But they have made no such call. I make the assertion
boldly, and without fear of contradiction, that no man who
does not hold an office, or does not aspire to one, has ever
found any fault of the bank. It has doubled the prices of the
products of their farms, and filled their pockets with a sound
circulating medium; and they are all well pleased with its
operations. No, sir, it is the politician who is the first to
sound the alarm (which, by the way, is a false one). It is he
who, by these unholy means, is endeavoring to blow up a storm
that he may ride upon and direct. It is he, and he alone,
that here proposes to spend thousands of the people's
public treasure, for no other advantage to them than to make
valueless in their pockets the reward of their industry. Mr.
Chairman, this work is exclusively the work, of politicians--a
set of men who have interests aside from the interests of
the people, and who, to say the most of them, are, taken as
a mass, at least one long step removed from honest men. I say
this with the greater freedom, because, being a politician
myself, none can regard it as personal."

[Illustration: OLD