Page:A History of Banking in the United States.djvu/230

 In a letter intended as an apology for the Bank and a reply to the Committe of 1832, Biddle wrote, "Undoubtedly if the Bank had chosen to adopt such a course, it would have been easy, by an immediate diminution of its loans, to place itself out of the reach of all inconvenience; but it would at the same time have inflicted very deep wounds on the community, and seriously endangered the revenue of government. These exertions of mere power have no attraction, and it was deemed a far wiser policy to deal with the utmost gentleness to the commercial community; to avoid all shocks; to abstain from countenancing all exaggerations and alarm; but to stand quietly by and assist, if necessary, the operations of nature, and the laws of trade, which can always correct their own transient excesses. Accordingly the whole policy of the Bank, for the last six months, has been exclusively protective and conservative, calculated to mitigate suffering and yet avert danger."

The facts above narrated in regard to the attempted curtailments, etc., also account for the heats and chills of the money market, which the anti-Bank men interpreted either as attempts of the Bank to make its power felt and dreaded, or to curry favor. No such explanations are called for. We have already seen ample evidence that such recurrent heats and chills were incident to the "credit system." The momentum of the movements which had been started in the affairs of the Bank since 1823 fully suffice to account for all the phenomena that are presented. A candid student of the history of the Bank cannot say that it was above panic-mongering or popularityhunting, but it was quite fully occupied, in 1831 and 1832, in mitigating its own sufferings and averting its own dangers, and had no freedom to do anything for effect.

Gallatin says that the Bank of the United States ceased to regulate the currency in 1832 and 1833, when it expanded its discounts and stock investments to 185 per cent. of its capital, while sound city banks did not carry their profit-bringing investments beyond 160 per cent. of their capital. It was, he argues, only by keeping this proportion lower than that of the city banks that the Bank of the United States could keep them debtors, and so exert its regulating power. From this point of time also dates another very important fact, namely, the complete predominance of Biddle's personal authority in the Bank. He was flattered and caressed, was encouraged to consider himself the prince of financiers, was allowed almost free control of the Bank, and his authority was accepted as decisive in many of the great financial enterprises allied with it.

During the spring and summer of 1832, he took quarters at the city of Washington, from which he directed the congressional campaign on behalf of the recharter, which was a part of the presidential campaign which was then agitating the whole country. He and Jackson were personally pitted against each other. If Biddle had succeeded in defeating Jackson, what