with the States (both measures carried by the help of votes from professing friends), had put that measure into the hands of those who would be sure to use it: but he could have provided against it, and prepared for it, and lessened the force of the blow when it did come. He might have quickened the vigilance of the Secretary of the Treasury--might have demanded additional securities from the deposit banks--and might have drawn from them the moneys called for by appropriation acts. There was a sum of about five millions which might have been saved with a stroke of the pen, being the aggregate of sums drawn from the treasury by the numerous disbursing officers, and left in the banks in their own names for daily current payments: an order to these officers would have saved these five millions, and prevented the disgrace and damage of a stoppage in the daily payments, and the spectacle of a government waking up in the morning without a dollar to pay the day-laborer with, while placing on its statute book a law for the distribution of forty millions of surplus. Measures like these, and others which a prudent vigilance would have suggested, might have enabled the government to continue its payments without an extra session of Congress, and without the mortification of capitulating to the broken banks, by accepting and paying out their depreciated notes as the currency of the federal treasury. CHAPTER III. PREPARATION FOR THE DISTRESS AND SUSPENSION. In the autumn of the preceding year, shortly before the meeting of Congress, Mr. Biddle, president of the Pennsylvania Bank of the United States (for that was the ridiculous title it assumed after its resurrection under a Pennsylvania charter), issued one of those characteristic letters which were habitually promulgated whenever a new lead was to be given out, and a new scent emitted for the followers of the bank to run upon. A new distress, as the pretext for a new catastrophe, was now the object. A picture of ruin was presented, alarm given out, every thing going to destruction; and the federal government the cause of the whole, and the _national_ recharter of the defunct bank the sovereign remedy. The following is an extract from that letter.