First. It may justify substantially a system of discounts of the most
objectionable character. It is to deal in bills of exchange drawn in one
State and payable in another without any restraint. The bill of exchange
may have an unlimited time to run, and its renewability is nowhere
guarded against. It may, in fact, assume the most objectionable form of
accommodation paper. It is not required to rest on any actual, real, or
substantial exchange basis. A drawer in one place becomes the accepter
in another, and so in turn the accepter may become the drawer upon a
mutual understanding. It may at the same time indulge in mere local
discounts under the name of bills of exchange. A bill drawn at
Philadelphia on Camden, N.J., at New York on a border town in New
Jersey, at Cincinnati on Newport, in Kentucky, not to multiply other
examples, might, for anything in this bill to restrain it, become a mere
matter of local accommodation. Cities thus relatively situated would
possess advantages over cities otherwise situated of so decided a
character as most justly to excite dissatisfaction.

Second. There is no limit prescribed to the premium in the purchase
of bills of exchange, thereby correcting none of the evils under which
the community now labors, and operating most injuriously upon the
agricultural States, in which the irregularities in the rates of
exchange are most severely felt. Nor are these the only consequences.
A resumption of specie payments by the banks of those States would be
liable to indefinite postponement; for as the operation of the agencies
of the interior would chiefly consist in selling bills of exchange, and
the purchases could only be made in specie or the notes of banks paying
specie, the State banks would either have to continue with their doors
closed or exist at the mercy of this national monopoly of brokerage.
Nor can it be passed over without remark that whilst the District of