Page:Debates in the Several State Conventions, v4.djvu/428

412 to the power of borrowing money, vested in Congress by the Constitution, and controverted the idea that a bank was necessary to carry it into execution. It might, he granted, conduce to a greater facility in exercising that power; but that it was expedient or necessary he denied, either to effect loans or establish the government.

If Congress, in this instance, he observed, exercised the power of erecting corporations, it was nowhere limited, and they might, if they thought fit, extend it to every object, and, in consequence thereof, monopolies of the East and West India trade be established ; and this would place us, he said, in the precise situation of a nation without a free constitution.

He referred to the clause in the Constitution which prohibits Congress from giving a preference to one part of the United States over another. This he considered, together with his other objections, fully sufficient to justify a rejection of the plan.

He then offered some observations relative to the expediency of the measure. If it is problematical only, whether the establishment of this national bank is agreeable to the Constitution, this ought to be, he thought, sufficient to prevent an adoption of the system. He showed the consequences which will result from a doubt of the legality of the measure. He noticed the objection which had been originally made by the people to the Constitution, and the pains which were taken to obviate their fears and apprehensions. The adoption of this plan, he said, would realize many of their disagreeable anticipations. He denied the necessity of a bank for the preservation of government. The only object, as the subject struck his mind, was to raise stock; but it was certainly not expedient, he conceived, to kindle the flame of discontent, and rouse the fears and jealousies of the people, in many states, to raise stock.

He took notice of some observations which had fallen from a gentleman from Connecticut, respecting incidental powers, and denied that Congress possessed those powers. The general government, he said, was not a consolidated government, but a federal government, possessed of such powers as the states or the people had expressly delegated; but to support these incidental powers, ceded to Congress, was to make it, not a federal, not even a republican consolidated government, but a despotic one. If this idea was contemplated, the people would be alarmed, they would be justly alarmed, and he hoped they would be alarmed.

Mr. VINING observed, that he had endeavored to give the subject a full and dispassionate consideration ; and, so far from thinking the plan contrary to the Constitution, he considered it perfectly consonant to it.

He adverted to the principles, design, and operations of the bank systems. Their usefulness he deduced from the experience of those countries which had been the longest in the use of those institutions. The constitutionality of the measure he urged from a fair construction of those powers, expressly delegated, and from a necessary implication; for he insisted that the Constitution was a dead letter, if implied powers were not to be exercised.

Mr. MADISON did not oppose all the banking systems, but did not approve of the plan now under consideration.

Upon the general view of banks, he recapitulated the several advantages which may be derived from them. The public credit, he granted, might be raised for a time, but only partially. Banks, he conceived, tended to diminish the quantity of precious metals in a country; and the