One cries, that we Americans are an unconscionably greedy people, ever hasting to get rich, never satisfied with our gains, and, in the frantic eagerness of accumulation, disregarding alike justice, truth, probity, and moderation. Under this impulse our trade becomes an incessant and hazardous adventure, like the stakes of the gambler upon the turn of the dice, or upon the figures of the sweat-cloth; a feverish impatience for success pushes everything to the verge of ruin, and only after it has toppled over the brink, and we have followed it, does the danger of the game we had been playing become apparent.--A second qualifies this view, and shouts, that our vice is not so much greed, which is the vice of the miser, as extravagance, which is the vice of the spendthrift; and that as soon as we get one dollar, we run in debt for ten. We must have fine houses, fine horses, fine millinery, fine upholstery, troops of servants, and give costly dinners, and attend magnificent balls. Our very shops and counting-houses must resemble the palaces of the Venetian nobility, and our dwellings be more royally arrayed than the dwellings of the mightiest monarchs. When the time comes--as come it will--for paying for all this glorious frippery, we collapse, we wither, we fleet, we sink into the sand.--A third Diogenes, of a more practical turn of mind, vociferates, that the whole thing comes from the want of a high protective tariff. These subtle and malignant foreigners, who are so jealous of our progress, who are ever on the watch to ruin us, who make any quantity of goods at any time, for nothing, and send them here just at the right moment, to swamp us irrecoverably, are the authors of the mischief, and ought to be kept outside of the nation by a triple wall of icebergs drawn around each port. They pour in upon us a flood of commodities, which destroys our manufactures; they carry off all our gold and silver, which eviscerates the banks; the banks squeeze the merchants, to the last drop of blood; and the merchants perish in the process, carrying with them hosts of mechanics, farmers, and professional men.--Not so, bellows a fourth philosopher, perhaps a little more seedy than the rest; it is all the work of "the infernal credit system,"--of the practice of making money out of that which is only a promise to pay money,--out of that which purports to have a real equivalent in some vault, when no such equivalent exists, and is, therefore, a fraud on the face of it,--and which, deluging the community, raises the price of everything, begets speculation, stimulates an excessive and factitious trade, and is then suddenly withdrawn from the system, at the height of its inflation, like wind sucked from a bladder, to leave it a mere flaccid, wrinkled, empty, worthless old film of fat!