Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
From this influence they can not now entirely escape, for it has its origin
in the credit currencies of the two countries; it is strengthened by the
current of trade and exchange which centers in London, and is rendered
almost irresistible by the large debts contracted there by our merchants,
our banks, and our States. It is thus that an introduction of a new bank
into the most distant of our villages places the business of that village
within the influence of the money power in England; it is thus that every
new debt which we contract in that country seriously affects our own
currency and extends over the pursuits of our citizens its powerful
influence. We can not escape from this by making new banks, great or small,
State or national. The same chains which bind those now existing to the
center of this system of paper credit must equally fetter every similar
institution we create. It is only by the extent to which this system has
been pushed of late that we have been made fully aware of its irresistible
tendency to subject our own banks and currency to a vast controlling power
in a foreign lad, and it adds a new argument to those which illustrate
their precarious situation.. Endangered in the first place by their own
mismanagement and again by the conduct of every institution which connects
them with the center of trade in our own country, they are yet subjected
beyond all this to the effect of whatever measures policy, necessity, or
caprice may induce those who control the credits of England to resort to. I
mean not to comment upon these measures, present or past, and much less to
discourage the prosecution of fair commercial dealing between the two
countries, based on reciprocal benefits; but it having now been made
manifest that the power of inflicting these and similar injuries is by the
resistless law of a credit currency and credit trade equally capable of
extending their consequences through all the ramifications of our banking
system, and by that means indirectly obtaining, particularly when our banks
are used as depositories of the public moneys, a dangerous political
influence in the United States, I have deemed it my duty to bring the
subject to your notice and ask for it your serious consideration.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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