proved unable to prevent an undue expansion of credit and the evils that
flow from it. Nor can I find any tenable ground for the reestablishment
of a national bank in the derangement alleged at present to exist in the
domestic exchanges of the country or in the facilities it may be capable
of affording them. Although advantages of this sort were anticipated
when the first Bank of the United States was created, they were regarded
as an incidental accommodation, not one which the Federal Government was
bound or could be called upon to furnish. This accommodation is now,
indeed, after the lapse of not many years, demanded from it as among its
first duties, and an omission to aid and regulate commercial exchange
is treated as a ground of loud and serious complaint. Such results only
serve to exemplify the constant desire among some of our citizens to
enlarge the powers of the Government and extend its control to subjects
with which it should not interfere. They can never justify the creation
of an institution to promote such objects. On the contrary, they justly
excite among the community a more diligent inquiry into the character
of those operations of trade toward which it is desired to extend such
peculiar favors.

The various transactions which bear the name of domestic exchanges
differ essentially in their nature, operation, and utility. One class of
them consists of bills of exchange drawn for the purpose of transferring
actual capital from one part of the country to another, or to anticipate
the proceeds of property actually transmitted. Bills of this description
are highly useful in the movements of trade and well deserve all the
encouragement which can rightfully be given to them. Another class is
made up of bills of exchange not drawn to transfer actual capital nor
on the credit of property transmitted, but to create fictitious capital,
partaking at once of the character of notes discounted in bank and of
bank notes in circulation, and swelling the mass of paper credits to a