Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/365

Rh with bank currency. But that currency, by producing a redundancy of circulating medium, became an ostracism against the innocent and patriotick specie.

It follows that bank paper is an operative agent in the adjustment of the level of specie, throughout the commercial world, though local itself; because the specie it banishes from one country, goes off to another. Hence a country, by confining her currency to specie, will receive remittances in coin from all others resorting to bank currency; by resorting to it, the same country sends such remittances to other countries in coin also. Banking therefore effects two ends completely: it enriches other countries by the expulsion of specie; and it enriches stockholders by the price paid for their paper, to supply the place of the expelled specie. Do Ave incur the first misfortune, for the sake of the second?

The disappearance of specie, ascertains that its quantity sufficed to render every commercial service which currency can render, and no amount can render more service than a sufficient amount. But though no amount of currency, can perform services for a nation, beyond the national demand for such services, yet an artificial bank currency may be thrown into circulation, capable of taxing, but incapable of serving a nation. Supposing that fifty millions of specie have been taken out of circulation by banking, and that this sum sufficed to meet all our demands for a currency, we now give five millions annually to get too much of that, of which we had enough for nothing; and with which we were regularly supplied, by the equalising nature of universal currency; just as Virginia, by an utter exclusion of paper, would have been supplied with specie. The single quality of universal currency, possessed by bank paper, consists of a detrimental capacity to expel specie, whilst it is unable to go abroad itself, to remove the evils arising from a redundant currency. Of these qualities, a state of the Union, or the whole Union, may avail itself, as a means of turning the paper systems of other states, or of the commercial world,