It was not strange that Mr. Jefferson, near the close of the War of 1812, stated more clearly than I could do the conflict between local bank paper and United States notes. He, who during his whole life was so mindful of the rights of the states, and so jealous of paper money, in brief and terse language designated the only way in which our country could carry on war. In his letter to Mr. Cooper, dated September 10, 1814, just at the close of the war, he said: "The banks have discontinued themselves. We are now without any medium, and necessity, as well as patriotism and confidence, will make us all eager to receive treasury notes, if founded on specific taxes. "Congress may now borrow of the public, and without interest, all the money they may want, to the amount of a competent circulation, by merely issuing their own promissory notes of proper denominations for the larger purposes of circulation, but not for the small. Leave that door open for the entrance of metallic money. . . . Providence seems, indeed, by a special dispensation, to have put down for us, without a struggle, that very paper enemy which the interest of our citizens long since required ourselves to put down, at whatever risk. "The work is done. The moment is pregnant with futurity, and if not seized at once by Congress, I know not on what shoal our bark is next to be stranded. The state legislatures should be immediately urged to relinquish the right of establishing banks of discount. Most of them will comply, on patriotic principles, under the convictions of the moment, and the non-complying may be crowded into concurrence by legitimate devices." I also quoted another extract to show that this matter filled the mind of Mr. Jefferson. He said: "Put down the banks, and if this country could not be carried through the longest war, against her most powerful enemy, without ever knowing the want of a dollar, without dependence on the traitorous classes of her citizens, without bearing hard on the resources of the people, or loading the public with an indefinite burthen of debt, I know nothing of my countrymen. Not by any novel project, not by any charlatanry, but by ordinary and well-experienced means; by the total prohibition of all paper at all times, by reasonable taxes in war, aided by the necessary emissions of public paper of circulating size, this bottomed on special taxes, redeemable annually as this special tax comes in, and finally within a moderate period--even with the flood of private paper by which we were deluged--would the treasury have ventured its credit in bills of circulating size, as of five or ten dollars, etc., they would have been greedily received by the people in preference to bank paper."