But the banks now regulate its value by controlling
prices, by substituting their money for coin, and by expelling it from
the country at their pleasure. Recollect, these powers over commerce and
money are _exclusive_, not concurrent, so adjudicated, and the
Constitution, in delegating them exclusively to the Government, withheld
them altogether from the States. The conceded fact that these powers are
_exclusive_, proves that the States cannot, by any instrumentality,
directly or indirectly, control their exercise. An exclusive authority
necessarily forbids any control or interference. But there are express
prohibitions in the Constitution as well as grants. That instrument
declares that 'no _State_ shall emit _bills of credit_.' The State
itself cannot emit circulating paper: how then can it authorize this to
be done by a State corporation, which is the mere creature of a State
law? The State cannot authorize its _Governor_ to issue such paper: how
then can it direct a _cashier_, deriving all his power only from a State
law, to do the same thing? _Qui facit per alium, facit per se_, and this
fundamental maxim of law and reason is violated when a State does
through any instrumentality, created by it, what the State cannot do
itself.

It is true that a majority of the Supreme Court of the United States, in
11 Peters 257, did decide that the Bank of the Commonwealth of Kentucky
did not violate that clause of the Constitution forbidding States to
'emit bills of credit,' but Justice Story, in his dissenting opinion,
said: 'When this cause was formerly argued before this court, a majority
of the judges who then heard it were decidedly of opinion that the act
of Kentucky establishing this bank was unconstitutional and void, as
amounting to an authority to emit bills of credit, for and on behalf of
the State, within the prohibition of the Constitution of the United
States. In principle, it was thought to be decided by the case of Craig
_v._ the State of Missouri (4 Peters 410). Among that majority was the
late Chief Justice Marshall.' This decision, then, in the case of the
Bank of Kentucky, is overthrown, _as an authority_, by the fact that it
was against the decision of the Supreme Court in a former case, and
against the opinion of a majority of the court in that very case before
the death of Chief Justice Marshall. In delivering the opinion of the
court in the Missouri case (4 Peters 410), Chief Justice Marshall
defined wha