he general did
not believe the world was round, might easily convince himself that he
knew all about banking. As he had, besides all this, very keen
observation and great intuitive judgment of character, he was probably
right in his point of attack. There is little doubt that the Bank of the
United States, under Nicholas Biddle, concentrated in itself an enormous
power; and it spent in four years, by confession of its directors,
$58,000 in what they called self-defence "against politicians." When on
July 10, 1832, General Jackson, in a message supposed to have been
inspired by Amos Kendall, vetoed the bill renewing the charter of the
bank, he performed an act of courage, taking counsel with his instincts.
But when in the year following he performed the act known as the
"Removal of the Deposits," or, in other words, caused the public money
to be no longer deposited in the National Bank and its twenty-five
branches, but in a variety of State banks instead, then he took counsel
of his ignorance.

The consequence, immediate or remote, was an immense galvanizing into
existence of State banks, and ultimately a vast increase of paper money.
The Sub-Treasury system had not then been thought of; there was no
proper place of deposit for the public funds; their possession was a
direct stimulus to speculation; and the president's cure was worse than
the disease. All the vast inflation of 1835 and 1836 and the business
collapse of 1837 were due to the fact not merely that Andrew Jackson
brought all his violent and persistent will to bear against the United
States Bank, but that when he got the power into his own hands he did
not know what to do with it. Not one of his biographers--hardly even a
bigoted admirer, so far as I know--now claims that his course in this
respect was anything but a mistake. "No monster bank," says Professor W.
G. Sumner, "under the most malicious management, could have produced as
much havoc, either political or financial, as this system produced while
it lasted." If the bank was, as is now generally admitted, a dangerous
institution, Jackson was in the right to resist it; he was right even in
disregarding the enormous flood of petitions that poured in to its
support. But to oppose a dangerous bank does not necessarily make one an
expert in banking. The utmost that can be said in favor of his action is
that the calamitous results showed the great power of the institution he
overthrew, and that if he had let