a great deal is often
accomplished when the terms of it are clearly stated.

It is not enough, in considering the effects before us, to say that
they are the results of a panic. No doubt there has been a panic, a
contagious consternation, spreading itself over the commercial world,
and strewing the earth with innumerable wrecks of fortune; but that
accounts for nothing, and simply describes a symptom. What is the cause
of the panic itself? These daring Yankees, who are in the habit of
braving the wildest tempests on every sea, these sturdy English, who
march into the mouths of devouring cannon without a throb, these gallant
Frenchmen, who laugh as they scale the Malakoff in the midst of belching
fires, are not the men to run like sheep before an imaginary terror.
When a whole nation of such drop their arms and scatter panic-stricken,
there must be something behind the panic; there must be something
formidable in it, some real and present danger threatening a very
positive evil, and not a mere sympathetic and groundless alarm.

Neither do we conceive it as sufficiently expressing or explaining the
whole facts of the case, to say that the currency has been deranged.
There has been unquestionably a great derangement of the currency; but
this may have been an effect rather than a cause of the more general
disturbance; or, again, it may have been only one cause out of many
causes. In an article in the first number of this magazine, the
financial fluctuations in this country are ascribed to the alternate
inflation and collapse of our factitious paper-money. Adopting the
prevalent theory, that the universal use of specie in the regulation
of the international trade of the world determines for each nation the
amount of its metallic treasure, it was there argued that any redundant
local circulation of paper must raise the level of local prices above
the legitimate specie over exports; which imports can be paid for only
in specie,--the very basis of the inordinate local circulation. Of
course, then, there is a rapid contraction in the issue of notes, and an
inevitable and wide-spread rupture of the usual relations of trade. But
although this view is true in principle, and particularly true in its
application to the United States, where trade floats almost exclusively
upon a paper ocean, it is yet an elementary and local view;--local, as
not comprising the state of facts in England and France; and elementary,
inasmuch as it omit