aracter given to the Bank of England
has not prevented excessive fluctuations in their currency, and it
proved unable to keep off a suspension of specie payments, which lasted
for nearly a quarter of a century. And why should we expect it to be
otherwise? A national institution, though deriving its charter from a
different source than the State banks, is yet constituted upon the same
principles, is conducted by men equally exposed to temptation, and is
liable to the same disasters, with the additional disadvantage that
its magnitude occasions an extent of confusion and distress which the
mismanagement of smaller institutions could not produce. It can scarcely
be doubted that the recent suspension of the United States Bank of
Pennsylvania, of which the effects are felt not in that State alone, but
over half the Union, had its origin in a course of business commenced
while it was a national institution, and there is no good reason for
supposing that the same consequences would not have followed had it
still derived its powers from the General Government. It is in vain,
when the influences and impulses are the same, to look for a difference
in conduct or results. By such creations we do, therefore, but increase
the mass of paper credit and paper currency, without checking their
attendant evils and fluctuations. The extent of power and the efficiency
of organization which we give, so far from being beneficial, are in
practice positively injurious. They strengthen the chain of dependence
throughout the Union, subject all parts more certainly to common
disaster, and bind every bank more effectually in the first instance
to those of our commercial cities, and in the end to a foreign power.
In a word, I can not but believe that, with the full understanding of
the operations of our banking system which experience has produced,
public sentiment is not less opposed to the creation of a national bank
for purposes connected with currency and commerce than for those
connected with the fiscal operations of the Government.

Yet the commerce and currency of the country are suffering evils from
the operations of the State banks which can not and ought not to be
overlooked. By their means we have been flooded with a depreciated
paper, which it was evidently the design of the framers of the
Constitution to prevent when they required Congress to "coin money and
regulate the value of foreign coins," and when they forbade the States
"to coin