Page:A History of Banking in the United States.djvu/95

 which it had performed with great profit, as we have seen, in the first Bank. it made a note at five per cent., interest payable quarterly, to take stock in a bank which could not be expected to pay over seven per cent. semi-annually. When the troubles came and the Bank paid no dividend, its enemies were fond of figuring up how much the public paid annually for the privilege of being a stockholder.

This, however, only touched upon the profit or loss of the arrangement, not on its propriety. When the government gained by the Bank, as it did later, private individuals naturally asked themselves why they might not, by associating themselves, do the same. Ten men who, individually, could not have borrowed ten dollars apiece, associated themselves into a "bank" and by circulation and deposits borrowed $100,000.

In the fourth place, the arrangement about voting on stock in the Bank, although it was universal and had been borrowed from England, proved mischievous. Some gentlemen at Baltimore who had had great experience in organizing financial institutions had devised the plan of subscribing by attorney. George Williams a government director took 1,172 shares as attorney in the name of 1,172 different persons. In his testimony before the Committee of 1819, he declared that this was a common procedure, which indeed it was, and that the market price of proxies was eleven pence. Baltimore took in all 40,141 shares on 15,628 names, and got 22,137 votes out of 77,759, which was the total number of votes which all the stockholders were entitled to under the rule, taking the subscriptions as they were actually made. The clique at that place thus took less than one-seventh of the shares and got over one-fourth of the votes. At Philadelphia, where one-third of the shares were taken, only two-ninths of the votes where held.

We must also notice that the public expected of the Bank faultless performance of two functions. It was to provide a uniform currency or equalize the exchanges, and it was to collect and pay, on behalf of the Treasury of the United States, at all points and without delay. Under the former head, it was expected not only to furnish notes of its own at a uniform value everywhere, but also to force the local banks to come to an equality by coming to the same standard. The notion of equalizing the exchanges, or making a uniform currency is elusive and illusory. What people meant was that they wanted to be able to put a note in a letter at one place and have it current at par of specie at any place to which it might be sent. In the discussions which arose it was often unclear whether it was expected that all notes should be equally valuable at all places, or at all times, or all equal to each other. The only realizable equality was that all should be brought up to specie at the place of issue and redemption, and in that sense, be equal to each other. The more intelligent demand on the Bank was that it should make its own notes a universal currency, and force the local banks everywhere to keep theirs up to par with those of the Bank.