mediate creditors or injury to the particular community in which
they are placed. This dependence of a bank, which is in proportion to
the extent of its debts for circulation and deposits, is not merely on
others in its own vicinity, but on all those which connect it with the
center of trade. Distant banks may fail without seriously affecting
those in our principal commercial cities, but the failure of the latter
is felt at the extremities of the Union. The suspension at New York in
1837 was everywhere, with very few exceptions, followed as soon as it
was known. That recently at Philadelphia immediately affected the banks
of the South and West in a similar manner. This dependence of our whole
banking system on the institutions in a few large cities is not found
in the laws of their organization, but in those of trade and exchange.
The banks at that center, to which currency flows and where it is
required in payments for merchandise, hold the power of controlling
those in regions whence it comes, while the latter possess no means
of restraining them; so that the value of individual property and the
prosperity of trade through the whole interior of the country are made
to depend on the good or bad management of the banking institutions in
the great seats of trade on the seaboard.

But this chain of dependence does not stop here. It does not terminate
at Philadelphia or New York. It reaches across the ocean and ends in
London, the center of the credit system. The same laws of trade which
give to the banks in our principal cities power over the whole banking
system of the United States subject the former, in their turn, to the
money power in Great Britain. It is not denied that the suspension of
the New York banks in 1837, which was followed in quick succession
throughout the Union, was produced by an application of that power, and
it is now alleged, in extenuation of the present condition of so large
a portion of our banks, that their embarrassments have arisen from the
same cause.

From this influence they can not now entirely escape, for it has its
origin in the credit currencies of the two countries; it is strengthened
by the current of trade and exchange which centers in London, and is
rendered almost irresistible by the large debts contracted there by our
merchants, our banks, and our States. It is thus that an introduction of
a new bank into the most distant of our villages places the business of
that village within