The advantages which banks reap is confined to that of gaining time, at the expence of paying interest. The interest paid by them is an aukward operation. They receive interest for the note; because they have in their possession the original security given for the notes when they were first issued; and they begin to refund this interest to the holder of the note from the time they make use of the optional clause. Could the banks, therefore, borrow coin in a moment, and pay the same interest for the coin which they pay to the holder of the note, they would certainly never make use of this optional clause. But this coin is not to be found in a moment; and the banks, to save themselves the trouble, and the expence of augmenting the fund of coin, or of procuring a fund out of another country, upon which they might draw for the payment of that national balance, which, by becoming banks, they tacitly engage to pay for the nation, render the credit of individuals precarious with strangers, and raise a general distrust of the whole society which they ought to serve. Here then is a very great loss resulting to a nation from the establishment of banks. Were no bank established, no merchant would contract a debt to strangers, without foreseeing the ready means of discharging it with the coin circulating in the country. In proportion as this coin came to diminish, so would foreign contractions of debt diminish also. Thus _credit_, at least, might be kept up, although trade might be circumscribed, and manufactures be discouraged. Now when, in order to advance trade and encourage manufactures, a statesman lends his hand towards the melting down of solid property, and countenances banks so far as to leave that operation to them, with the emolument of receiving interest for all their paper; and when, in order to facilitate the circulation of this paper, the very inhabitants concur in throwing all their specie into a bank, is it reasonable to indulge banks so far as to allow them to add an optional clause, which disappoints the whole scheme, which stops trade, ruins manufactures, raises the interest of money, and renders the operation of melting down property quite ineffectual for the purposes which it was intended to answer? Farther, The loss a bank may be at, in providing coin, is susceptible of estimation, let it be brought from ever so distant a country; because we know that the quantity to be provided, never can exceed the value of the _grand balance_. But who can estimate the loss a nation sustains, when an interruption is put to carrying on trade and manufactures? When the industrious classes of inhabitants are forced to be idle for a short time, the consequences are hardly to be repaired: they starve, they desert; the spirit of industry is extinguished; in short, all goes to ruin.