Unpopular as was the _Evening Post’s_ defense of free speech, its stand upon financial and economic questions was far more heartily detested. It rapidly ceased, after its first attacks upon the Bank, to hold its old position as a representative of the city’s commercial interests. It is true that some rich New Yorkers felt a jealousy of the Bank because it belonged to Philadelphia, while others stood loyally with the Democratic Party in denouncing it. But Gulian Verplanck and Ogden Hoffman, close friends of the _Post_, were typical of many who went over to the Bank’s side. Not a few business men affiliated with Tammany joined the ranks of Jackson’s enemies. Historical opinion inclines to the view that Jackson did not have a sufficient case against the Bank, which was a salutary institution, and certainly New York commercial circles believed this. A majority of the voters were with Jackson. Thurlow Weed told a friend that all of Webster’s unanswerable arguments for the Bank would not win one-tenth the ballots won by two sentences in Jackson’s veto message relating to European stockholders and wicked special privilege. But it was not the mass of poor voters on which a sixpenny journal like the _Evening Post_ relied for sustenance, but upon the professional and business men. Leggett’s cardinal conviction, expressed with a fire and energy then unequaled in journalism, was that the great enemy of democracy is monopoly. He hated and assailed all special incorporations, for in those days they usually carried very special privileges. Charters were obtained by wire-pulling and legislative corruption, he said, to put a few men, as the ferry-owners in New York City, in a position where they could gouge the public. He wished banking placed upon such a basis that legislative incorporation, exclusive in nature, would not be needed. He wanted all franchises abolished, and would have forbidden any grant to a company of the exclusive right to build a turnpike, canal, railroad, or water-system between two given points. He objected even to the incorporation of colleges and churches, quoting Adam Smith to show that his views upon this head were less eccentric than they seemed. Joint stock partnerships, he believed, would meet all business necessities. The Legislature should “pass one general law, which will allow any set of men, who choose to associate together for any purpose, to form themselves into that convenient kind of partnership known by the name of incorporation”; so that any group would be permitted freely to form an insurance company, a bank, or a college granting degrees. This, of course, would not exclude governmental supervision. Although there were then grave abuses in monopolistic incorporation, Leggett pushed his doctrine quite too far.