the influence of the money power in England; it is
thus that every new debt which we contract in that country seriously
affects our own currency and extends over the pursuits of our citizens
its powerful influence. We can not escape from this by making new banks,
great or small, State or national. The same chains which bind those
now existing to the center of this system of paper credit must equally
fetter every similar institution we create. It is only by the extent to
which this system has been pushed of late that we have been made fully
aware of its irresistible tendency to subject our own banks and
currency to a vast controlling power in a foreign land, and it adds
a new argument to those which illustrate their precarious situation.
Endangered in the first place by their own mismanagement and again by
the conduct of every institution which connects them with the center of
trade in our own country, they are yet subjected beyond all this to the
effect of whatever measures policy, necessity, or caprice may induce
those who control the credits of England to resort to. I mean not
to comment upon these measures, present or past, and much less to
discourage the prosecution of fair commercial dealing between the two
countries, based on reciprocal benefits; but it having now been made
manifest that the power of inflicting these and similar injuries is by
the resistless law of a credit currency and credit trade equally capable
of extending their consequences through all the ramifications of our
banking system, and by that means indirectly obtaining, particularly
when our banks are used as depositories of the public moneys, a
dangerous political influence in the United States, I have deemed it my
duty to bring the subject to your notice and ask for it your serious
consideration.

Is an argument required beyond the exposition of these facts to show
the impropriety of using our banking institutions as depositories of
the public money? Can we venture not only to encounter the risk of
their individual and mutual mismanagement, but at the same time to place
our foreign and domestic policy entirely under the control of a foreign
moneyed interest? To do so is to impair the independence of our
Government, as the present credit system has already impaired the
independence of our banks; it is to submit all its important operations,
whether of peace or war, to be controlled or thwarted, at first by our
own banks and then by a power abro