If a national bank was, as is undeniable, repudiated by the framers of
the Constitution as incompatible with the rights of the States and the
liberties of the people; if from the beginning it has been regarded by
large portions of our citizens as coming in direct collision with that
great and vital amendment of the Constitution which declares that all
powers not conferred by that instrument on the General Government are
reserved to the States and to the people; if it has been viewed by them
as the first great step in the march of latitudinous construction, which
unchecked would render that sacred instrument of as little value as an
unwritten constitution, dependent, as it would alone be, for its meaning
on the interested interpretation of a dominant party, and affording no
security to the rights of the minority--if such is undeniably the case,
what rational grounds could have been conceived for anticipating aught
but determined opposition to such an institution at the present day.
Could a different result have been expected when the consequences which
have flowed from its creation, and particularly from its struggles to
perpetuate its existence, had confirmed in so striking a manner the
apprehensions of its earliest opponents; when it had been so clearly
demonstrated that a concentrated money power, wielding so vast a capital
and combining such incalculable means of influence, may in those
peculiar conjunctures to which this Government is unavoidably exposed
prove an overmatch for the political power of the people themselves;
when the true character of its capacity to regulate according to its
will and its interests and the interests of its favorites the value and
production of the labor and property of every man in this extended
country had been so fully and fearfully developed; when it was notorious
that all classes of this great community had, by means of the power and
influence it thus possesses, been infected to madness with a spirit of
heedless speculation; when it had been seen that, secure in the support
of the combination of influences by which it was surrounded, it could
violate its charter and set the laws at defiance with impunity; and
when, too, it had become most apparent that to believe that such an
accumulation of powers can ever be granted without the certainty of
being abused was to indulge in a fatal delusion?
To avoid the necessity of a permanent debt and its inevitable
consequences I have advocated and endeavored to carry into effect the
policy of confining the appropriations for the public service to such
objects only as are clearly within the constitutional authority of the
Federal Government; of excluding from its expenses those improvident and
unauthorized grants of public money for works of internal improvement
which were so wisely arrested by the constitutional interposition of my
predecessor, and which, if they had not been so checked, would long
before this time have involved the finances of the General Government
in embarrassments far greater than those which are now experienced by
any of the States; of limiting all our expenditures to that simple,
unostentatious, and economical administration of public affairs which is
alone consistent with the character of our institutions; of collecting
annually from the customs, and the sales of public lands a revenue fully
adequate to defray all the expenses thus incurred; but under no pretense
whatsoever to impose taxes upon the people to a greater amount than was
actually necessary to the public service conducted upon the principles
I have stated.
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