rom time to time, by the greatest
ministers, from Walpole to Peel,--it has had, from its position, its
power, and the talent at its command, every opportunity for doing
the best things that a bank could do; and yet behold this record of
periodical impotence! Its periodical mischiefs we leave out of the
account.

In the United States, we have suffered from similarly recurring attacks
of financial epilepsy; we have tried every expedient, and we have failed
in each one; we have had three national banks; we have had thousands
of chartered banks, under an infinity of regulations and restrictions
against excesses and frauds; and we have had, as the appropriate
commentary, three tremendous cataclysms, in which the whole continent
was submerged in commercial ruin, besides a dozen lesser epochs of
trying vicissitude. The history of our trade has been that of an
incessant round of inflations and collapses; and the amount of rascality
and fraud perpetrated in connection with the banks, in order to defeat
the restrictions upon them, has no parallel but in the sponging-houses.
A Belgian philosopher, from the study of statistics, has deduced a
certain order in disorder,--or a law of periodicity in the recurrence of
murders, suicides, crimes, and illegitimate births; and it appears that
a similar regularity of irregularity might be easily detected in our
cyclic bank explosions.

With the sad experiences of other nations before us,--with the rocks of
danger standing high out of the water, and covered all over with the
fragments of former wrecks, we have yet persisted in following the old
wretched way. What a humiliating confession! what a comment on the
alleged practical discernment of this practical people! what a text
for radicals, socialists, and all sorts of Utopian dreamers! If the
mischiefs of these monetary aberrations were confined to a mere loss
of wealth,[B] which is proverbial for its winged uncertainty, we might
regard them as a seeming admonition of Providence against putting
too much trust in riches; but they are to be considered as something
infinitely worse than mere reverses of fortune: the disorders they
generate shake the very foundations of morals; and while shattering
the industry, they undermine the economy and frugality and rend the
integrity of mankind. We doubt whether any of the great forms of evil
incident to our imperfect civilization--the slave-trade, debauchery,
pauperism--cause more individual anguish o