millions of gold and silver which have sustained the country and the government under the shock of the stoppage--has enabled the honest solvent banks to resume, and will leave the insolvent and political banks without excuse or justification for not resuming. Our experiments--I love the word, and am sorry that gentlemen of the opposition have ceased to repeat it--have brought an avalanche of gold and silver into the country; it is saturating us with the precious metals, it has relieved and sustained the country; and now when these experiments have been successful--have triumphed over all opposition--gentlemen cease their ridicule, and go to work with their paper-money resolutions to force the government to use paper, and thereby to drive off the gold and silver which our policy has brought into the country, destroy the specie basis of the banks, give us an exclusive paper currency again, and produce a new expansion and a new explosion. Justice to the men of this day requires these things to be stated. They have avoided the errors of 1811. They have avoided the pit into which they saw their predecessors fall. Those who prevented the renewal of the bank charter in 1811, did nothing else but prevent its renewal; they provided no substitute for the notes of the bank; did nothing to restore the currency of the constitution; nothing to revive the gold currency; nothing to increase the specie of the country. They fell back upon the exclusive use of local bank notes, without even doing any thing to strengthen the local banks, by discarding their paper under twenty dollars. They fell back upon the local banks; and the consequence was, the total prostration, the utter helplessness, the deplorable inability of the government to take care of itself, or to relieve and restore the country, when the banks failed. Those who prevented the recharter of the second Bank of the United States had seen all this; and they determined to avoid such error and calamity. They set out to revive the national gold currency, to increase the silver currency, and to reform and strengthen the banking system. They set out to do these things; and they have done them. Against a powerful combined political and moneyed confederation, they have succeeded; and the one hundred millions of gold and silver now in the country attests the greatness of their victory, and insures the prosperity of the country against the machinations of the wicked and the factious. CHAPTER XXII. MR. CLAY'S RESOLUTION IN FAVOR OF RESUMING BANKS, AND MR. BENTON'S REMARKS UPON IT.