The question, then, is, whether this melancholy march of things should be allowed to proceed, or whether we should strive to do better. Our good sense, our moral sense, our progressive instincts, conspire with our interests in proclaiming that we ought to do better; but how shall we do better? "Why," reply the great Democratic doctors,--Mr. Buchanan, the President, and Mr. Benton, the Nestor of the people,--"suppress the issue of small bank-notes!" Well, that nostrum is not to be despised; there would be some advantages in such a measure; it would, to a certain extent, operate as a check upon the issues of the banks; it would enlarge the specie basis, by confining the note circulation to the larger dealers, and so exempt the poorer and laboring classes from the chances of bank failures and suspensions. But if these gentlemen suppose that the extrusion of small notes would be in any degree a remedy for overtrading, or moderate in any degree the disastrous fluctuations of which everybody complains, they have read the history of commerce only in the most superficial manner. Speculations, overtrading, panics, money convulsions, occur in countries where small notes are not tolerated, just as they do in countries where they are; and they occur in both without our being able to trace them always to the state of the currency. The truth is, indeed, that nearly all the great catastrophes of trade have occurred in times and places when and where there were no small notes. Every one has heard of the tulip-mania of Holland,--when the Dutchmen, nobles, farmers, mechanics, sailors, maid-servants, and even chimney-sweeps and old-clothes-women, dabbled in bulbs,--when immense fortunes were staked upon the growth of a root, and the whole nation went mad about it, although there was never a bank nor a paper florin yet in existence.[C] Every one has heard of the great South-Sea Bubble in England, in 1719, when the stock of a company chartered simply to trade in the South Seas rose in the course of a few weeks to the extraordinary height of _eight hundred and ninety per cent.,_ and filled all England with an epidemic frenzy of gambling, so that the recoil ruined thousands upon thousands of persons, who dragged down with them vast companies and institutions.[D] Yet there was not a banknote in England, at that time, for less than twenty pounds, or nearly a hundred dollars. [Footnote C: Mackay's _History of Popular Delusions._] [Footnote D: Doubleday's _Financial History of England_, p. 93.]