t overthrow of
credit would have been prevented by the existence of a national bank.
Proneness to excessive issues has ever been the vice of the banking
system--a vice as prominent in national as in State institutions. This
propensity is as subservient to the advancement of private interests
in the one as in the other, and those who direct them both, being
principally guided by the same views and influenced by the same motives,
will be equally ready to stimulate extravagance of enterprise by
improvidence of credit. How strikingly is this conclusion sustained
by experience! The Bank of the United States, with the vast powers
conferred on it by Congress, did not or could not prevent former and
similar embarrassments, nor has the still greater strength it has been
said to possess under its present charter enabled it in the existing
emergency to check other institutions or even to save itself. In Great
Britain, where it has been seen the same causes have been attended with
the same effects, a national bank possessing powers far greater than are
asked for by the warmest advocates of such an institution here has also
proved unable to prevent an undue expansion of credit and the evils that
flow from it. Nor can I find any tenable ground for the reestablishment
of a national bank in the derangement alleged at present to exist in the
domestic exchanges of the country or in the facilities it may be capable
of affording them. Although advantages of this sort were anticipated
when the first Bank of the United States was created, they were regarded
as an incidental accommodation, not one which the Federal Government was
bound or could be called upon to furnish. This accommodation is now,
indeed, after the lapse of not many years, demanded from it as among its
first duties, and an omission to aid and regulate commercial exchange
is treated as a ground of loud and serious complaint. Such results only
serve to exemplify the constant desire among some of our citizens to
enlarge the powers of the Government and extend its control to subjects
with which it should not interfere. They can never justify the creation
of an institution to promote such objects. On the contrary, they justly
excite among the community a more diligent inquiry into the character
of those operations of trade toward which it is desired to extend such
peculiar favors.

The various transactions which bear the name of domestic exchanges
differ essentially in their natur