Is an argument required beyond the exposition of these facts to show
the impropriety of using our banking institutions as depositories of
the public money? Can we venture not only to encounter the risk of
their individual and mutual mismanagement, but at the same time to place
our foreign and domestic policy entirely under the control of a foreign
moneyed interest? To do so is to impair the independence of our
Government, as the present credit system has already impaired the
independence of our banks; it is to submit all its important operations,
whether of peace or war, to be controlled or thwarted, at first by our
own banks and then by a power abroad greater than themselves. I can not
bring myself to depict the humiliation to which this Government and
people might be sooner or later reduced if the means for defending their
rights are to be made dependent upon those who may have the most
powerful of motives to impair them.
Nor is it only in reference to the effect of this state of things on the
independence of our Government or of our banks that the subject presents
itself for consideration; it is to be viewed also in its relations to
the general trade of our country.
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