the President, and Mr. Benton, the Nestor of the people,--"suppress the
issue of small bank-notes!" Well, that nostrum is not to be despised;
there would be some advantages in such a measure; it would, to a certain
extent, operate as a check upon the issues of the banks; it would
enlarge the specie basis, by confining the note circulation to the
larger dealers, and so exempt the poorer and laboring classes from the
chances of bank failures and suspensions. But if these gentlemen suppose
that the extrusion of small notes would be in any degree a remedy for
overtrading, or moderate in any degree the disastrous fluctuations of
which everybody complains, they have read the history of commerce only
in the most superficial manner. Speculations, overtrading, panics, money
convulsions, occur in countries where small notes are not tolerated,
just as they do in countries where they are; and they occur in both
without our being able to trace them always to the state of the
currency. The truth is, indeed, that nearly all the great catastrophes
of trade have occurred in times and places when and where there were no
small notes. Every one has heard of the tulip-mania of Holland,--when
the Dutchmen, nobles, farmers, mechanics, sailors, maid-servants, and
even chimney-sweeps and old-clothes-women, dabbled in bulbs,--when
immense fortunes were staked upon the growth of a root, and the whole
nation went mad about it, although there was never a bank nor a paper
florin yet in existence.[C] Every one has heard of the great South-Sea
Bubble in England, in 1719, when the stock of a company chartered simply
to trade in the South Seas rose in the course of a few weeks to the
extraordinary height of _eight hundred and ninety per cent.,_ and filled
all England with an epidemic frenzy of gambling, so that the recoil
ruined thousands upon thousands of persons, who dragged down with them
vast companies and institutions.[D] Yet there was not a banknote in
England, at that time, for less than twenty pounds, or nearly a hundred
dollars.