He made another powerful and carefully wrought speech in favor of what he called the act to provide for the divorce of bank and state. This bill, as finally drawn, consisted of two distinct parts, one portion making provision for the keeping of the public moneys in an independent treasury, and the other for the hard-money currency, which was all that the government was to accept in payment of revenue dues. This last provision, however, was struck out, and the bill thereby lost the support of Calhoun, who, with Webster, Clay, and the other Whigs, voted against it; but, mainly through Benton's efforts, it passed the Senate, although by a very slender majority. Benton, in his speech, dwelt with especial admiration on the working of the monetary system of France, and held it up as well worthy to be copied by us. Most of the points he made were certainly good ones, although he overestimated the beneficent results that would spring from the adoption of the proposed system, believing that it would put an end for the future to all panics and commercial convulsions. In reality it would have removed only one of the many causes which go to produce the latter, leaving the others free to work as before; the people at large, not the government, were mainly to blame, and even with them it was in some respects their misfortune as much as their fault. Benton's error, however, was natural; like most other men he was unable fully to realize that hardly any phenomenon, even the most simple, can be said to spring from one cause only, and not from a complex and interwoven tissue of causation--and a panic is one of the least simple and most complex of mercantile phenomena. Benton's deep-rooted distrust of and hostility to such banking as then existed in the United States certainly had good grounds for existence. This distrust was shown again when the bill for the re-charter of the district banks came up. The specie basis of many of them had been allowed to become altogether too low; and Benton showed himself more keenly alive than any other public man to the danger of such a state of things, and argued strongly that a basis of specie amounting to one third the total of liabilities was the only safe proportion, and should be enforced by law. He made a most forcible argument, using numerous and apt illustrations to show the need of his amendment.