The people themselves were of course primarily responsible for the then existing state of affairs; but the government had done all in its power to make matters worse. Panics were certain to occur more or less often in so speculative and venturesome a mercantile community, where there was such heedless trust in the future and such recklessness in the use of credit. But the government, by its actions, immensely increased the severity of this particular panic, and became the prime factor in precipitating its advent. Benton tried to throw the blame mainly on the bankers and politicians, who, he alleged, had formed an alliance for the overthrow of the administration; but he made the plea more half-heartedly than usual, and probably in his secret soul acknowledged its puerility. The mass of the people were still happy in the belief that all things were working well, and that their show of unexampled prosperity and business activity denoted a permanent and healthy condition. Yet all the signs pointed to a general collapse at no distant date; an era of general bank suspensions, of depreciated currency, and of insolvency of the federal treasury was at hand. No one but Benton, however, seemed able to read the signs aright, and his foreboding utterances were laughed at or treated with scorn by his fellow statesmen. He recalled the memory of the times of 1818-19, when the treasury reports of one year showed a superfluity of revenue of which there was no want, and those of the next showed a deficit which required to be relieved by a loan; and he foretold an infinitely worse result from the inflation of the paper system, saying:-- Are we not at this moment, and from the same cause, realizing the first part--the elusive and treacherous part--of this picture? and must not the other, the sad and real sequel, speedily follow? The day of revulsion in its effects may be more or less disastrous; but come it must. The present bloat in the paper system cannot continue; violent contraction must follow enormous expansion; a scene of distress and suffering must ensue--to come of itself out of the present state of things, without being stimulated and helped on by our unwise legislation.... _I_ am one of those who _promised_ gold, not paper; _I did not join in putting down the Bank of the United_ _States to put up a wilderness of local banks. I did not join in putting down the currency of a national bank to put up a national paper currency of a thousand local banks._ I did not strike Cæsar to make Antony master of Rome. These last sentences referred to the passage of the act repealing the specie circular and making the notes of the banks receivable in payment of federal dues. The act was most mischievous, and Benton's criticisms both of it and of the great Whig senator who pressed it were perfectly just; but they apply with quite as much weight to Jackson's dealings with the deposits, which Benton had defended.