Page:Forgotten Man and Other Essays.djvu/380

 compounded of inexperience, ignorance, and fearless enterprise, marked politics as well as industry. Jackson's election in 1828 brought to power a party which had been produced by these circumstances.

The war debt of 1812 became payable in the years after 1824 and was distributed over the period down to 1835. With growth and increasing prosperity, the revenue increased with such rapidity that the debt could be paid almost as fast as it became payable. The chief purposes for which the Bank of the United States had been founded in 1816 were to provide a sound and uniform paper currency convertible with specie, of uniform value throughout the Union, and to act as fiscal agent for the government, holding the revenue wherever collected and disbursing the expenditures wherever they were to be made. The interest of the government and the people was the motive, and the bank charter was a contract with the Bank to perform the services for specified considerations. One of the considerations was the right of the Bank to use the deposits as loanable capital. The government was not bound to keep any balance over expenditure, but the revenue was so large that the Bank came to hold annually increasing average deposits of from five to eight or nine millions of public money, which it used for profit. From this vicious arrangement two consequences followed: first, public attention was directed to the deposits, not as existing for the public service, but for the profit of the Bank; and, second, the public considered itself entitled to claim something of the Bank besides true business credit, in the matter of discounts. Jackson opened the war on the Bank publicly in his first message. Sharp correspondence had been going on already between the Secretary of the Treasury and the Bank, which had reached such a point that the Secretary had referred to the removal of the deposits as a power in his hands to coerce the Bank. Generally speaking, the