Thirty Years' View (Vol. 2 of 2): or, A History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850 — John Shaqi
Thirty Years' View (Vol. 2 of 2): or, A History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850Benton, Thomas Hart
History
Thirty Years' View (Vol. 2 of 2): or, A History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850
Benton, Thomas Hart
United States -- Politics and government -- 1815-1861
"We do not tell a fictitious tale of woe; we have no selfish or
partisan views to sustain, when we assure you that the noble
city which we represent, lies prostrate in despair, its credit
blighted, its industry paralyzed, and without a hope beaming
through the darkness of the future, unless the government of our
country can be induced to relinquish the measures to which we
attribute our distress. We fully appreciate the respect which
is due to our chief magistrate, and disclaim every intention
inconsistent with that feeling; but we speak in behalf of a
community which trembles upon the brink of ruin, which deems
itself an adequate judge of all questions connected with the
trade and currency of the country, and believes that the policy
adopted by the recent administration and sustained by the
present, is founded in error, and threatens the destruction of
every department of industry. Under a deep impression of the
propriety of confining our declarations within moderate limits,
we affirm that the value of our real estate has, within the last
six months, depreciated more than forty millions: that within
the last two months, there have been more than two hundred and
fifty failures of houses engaged in extensive business: that
within the same period, a decline of twenty millions of dollars
has occurred in our local stocks, including those railroad
and canal incorporations, which, though chartered in other
States, depend chiefly upon New York for their sale: that the
immense amount of merchandise in our warehouses has within the
same period fallen in value at least thirty per cent.; that
within a few weeks, not less than twenty thousand individuals,
depending on their daily labor for their daily bread, have been
discharged by their employers, because the means of retaining
them were exhausted--and that a complete blight has fallen upon
a community heretofore so active, enterprising and prosperous.
The error of our rulers has produced a wider desolation than the
pestilence which depopulated our streets, or the conflagration,
which laid them in ashes. We believe that it is unjust to
attribute these evils to any excessive development of mercantile
enterprise, and that they really flow from that unwise system
which aimed at the substitution of a metallic for a paper
currency--the system which gave the first shock to the fabric of
our commercial prosperity by removing the public deposits from
the United States bank, which weakened every part of the edifice
by the destruction of that useful and efficient institution,
and now threatens to crumble it into a mass of ruins under the
operations of the specie circular, which withdrew the gold and
silver of the country from the channels in which it could be
profitably employed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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