We have felt but
one class of these dangers exhibited in the contest waged by the Bank
of the United States against the Government for the last four years.
Happily they have been obviated for the present by the indignant
resistance of the people, but we should recollect that the principle
whence they sprung is an ever-active one, which will not fail to renew
its efforts in the same and in other forms so long as there is a hope
of success, founded either on the inattention of the people or the
treachery of their representatives to the subtle progress of its
influence. The bank is, in fact, but one of the fruits of a system at
war with the genius of all our institutions--a system founded upon a
political creed the fundamental principle of which is a distrust of
the popular will as a safe regulator of political power, and whose
great ultimate object and inevitable result, should it prevail, is the
consolidation of all power in our system in one central government.
Lavish public disbursements and corporations with exclusive privileges
would be its substitutes for the original and as yet sound checks and
balances of the Constitution--the means by whose silent and secret
operation a control would be exercised by the few over the political
conduct of the many by first acquiring that control over the labor and
earnings of the great body of the people.
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