among all classes, and especially in our great commercial towns, of
luxurious habits founded too often on merely fancied wealth, and
detrimental alike to the industry, the resources, and the morals of
our people.

It was so impossible that such a state of things could long continue
that the prospect of revulsion was present to the minds of considerate
men before it actually came. None, however, had correctly anticipated
its severity. A concurrence of circumstances inadequate of themselves to
produce such widespread and calamitous embarrassments tended so greatly
to aggravate them that they can not be overlooked in considering their
history. Among these may be mentioned, as most prominent, the great loss
of capital sustained by our commercial emporium in the fire of December,
1835--a loss the effects of which were underrated at the time because
postponed for a season by the great facilities of credit then existing;
the disturbing effects in our commercial cities of the transfers of
the public moneys required by the deposit law of June, 1836, and the
measures adopted by the foreign creditors of our merchants to reduce
their debts and to withdraw from the United States a large portion of
our specie.

However unwilling any of our citizens may heretofore have been to assign
to these causes the chief instrumentality in producing the present state
of things, the developments subsequently made and the actual condition
of other commercial countries must, as it seems to me, dispel all
remaining doubts upon the subject. It has since appeared that evils
similar to those suffered by ourselves have been experienced in Great
Britain, on the Continent, and, indeed, throughout the commercial world,
and that in other countries as well as in our own they have been
uniformly preceded by an undue enlargement of the boundaries of trade,