Page:A History of Banking in the United States.djvu/296

 $35 million bank was unwise, and only a sign of the infatuation for banks, and proposed that an amendment to the Constitution should be sought to incorporate a national bank.

Adams did not reply to Biddle, but he also wrote a public letter in July: "We are now told," said he, "that all the banks in the United States have suspended specie payments; and what is the suspension of specie payments but setting the laws of property at defiance? If the president and directors of a bank have issued a million of bills, promising to pay five dollars to the holder of each and every one of them, the suspension of specie payments is by one act the breach of a million of promises. What is this but fraud upon every holder of their bills, and what difference is there between the president and directors of such a bank and the skillful artist who engraves a bank bill, a fac-simile of the bill signed by the president and directors, and saves them the trouble of signing it by doing it for them? The only difference that I can see in the two operations is that the artist gives evidence of superior skill and superior modesty. It requires more talent to sign another man's name than one's own, and the counterfeiter does at least his work in the dark, while the suspenders of specie payments brazen it in the face of day and laugh at the victims and dupes who have put faith in their promises."

Public meetings were held from one end of the country to the other about the suspension of specie payments, at which resolutions were adopted embodying every conceivable view of the case, its causes and its remedies. A meeting of loco focos at Philadelphia declared that all the banks were in league with Britain and European monarchies to plunder free America by draining off the gold. They appointed a committee to ask the banks to pay their five and ten dollar notes. The banks replied that on a specie currency only those could do business who had gold and silver. The banks supply by their credit a deficiency which otherwise would exist in the circulation. This was another repetition of the notion that "there would not be money enough to do the business if it were not for the bank issues." At the meeting at Baltimore the resolutions denounced the British party and the United States Bank for "preconcerted suspension;" they declared banking a fraud, and denounced the issue of small notes by corporations.

In May a Constitutional Convention was held in Pennsylvania, one of the chief causes for calling which had been the hope of introducing into the Constitution limitations on banking and paper money. A large party also hoped by this means to destroy the United States Bank. The attempt failed, but an article was put into the new Constitution requiring six months public notice of an intended application for the enactment or extension of a bank charter; no charter to run more than twenty years; every charter to reserve to the Legislature the right to amend or annul it, if injurious to citizens, though without injustice to corporators; no one law to create or extend the charter of more than one corporation.

On the 4th of July, an Anti-bank Convention was held at Harrisburgh,