r
it. 'My suggestions,' added Mr. Duane, 'as to an inquiry by Congress, as
in 1832, or a recourse to the judiciary, the President repelled, saying
that it would be idle to depend upon either; referring, as to the
judiciary, to the decisions already made as indications of what would be
the effect of an appeal to them in future.'

"These, then," continued Mr. Adams, "were the effective _reasons_ of
the President for requiring the removal of the deposits _before_ the
meeting of Congress. The corruptibility of Congress itself, and the
foregone decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, were
alike despised and degraded. The executive will was substituted in the
place of both. These reasons had been urged, without success, on one
Secretary of the Treasury, Louis McLane. He had been promoted out of
office, and they were now pressed upon the judgment and pliability of
another. He, too, was found refractory, and displaced. A third, more
accommodating, was found in the person of Mr. Taney. To _him_ the
reasons of the President were all-sufficient, and he adopted them
without reserve. They were all summed up in one,--_'Sic volo, sic
jubeo, stet pro_ RATIONE _voluntas_.'

"It is to be regretted that the Secretary of the Treasury did not feel
himself at liberty to assign this reason. In my humble opinion it ought
to have stood in front of all the rest. There is an air of conscious
shamefacedness in the suppression of that which was so glaringly
notorious; and something of an appearance of trifling, if not of
mockery, in presenting a long array of reasons, omitting that which lies
at the foundation of them all.

"The will of the President of the United States was the reason paramount
to all others for the removal, by the Secretary of the Treasury, of the
deposits from the Bank of the United States. It was part of his system
of simplifying the machine of government, to which it was admirably
adapted. It placed the whole revenue of the Union at any time at his
disposal, for any purpose to which he might see fit to apply it. In vain
had the laws cautiously stationed the Register, the Comptroller, the
Treasurer, as checks upon the Secretary of the Treasury, so that the
most trifling sum in the treasury should never be accessible to any one
or any two men. With a removal of the deposits and a transfer draft,
millions on millions may be transferred, by the stroke of the pen of a
supple and submissive Secretary of the Treasury,