investigation, and I shall ever stand ready to respond to the
call. But they have made no such call. I make the assertion
boldly, and without fear of contradiction, that no man who
does not hold an office, or does not aspire to one, has ever
found any fault of the bank. It has doubled the prices of the
products of their farms, and filled their pockets with a sound
circulating medium; and they are all well pleased with its
operations. No, sir, it is the politician who is the first to
sound the alarm (which, by the way, is a false one). It is he
who, by these unholy means, is endeavoring to blow up a storm
that he may ride upon and direct. It is he, and he alone,
that here proposes to spend thousands of the people's
public treasure, for no other advantage to them than to make
valueless in their pockets the reward of their industry. Mr.
Chairman, this work is exclusively the work, of politicians--a
set of men who have interests aside from the interests of
the people, and who, to say the most of them, are, taken as
a mass, at least one long step removed from honest men. I say
this with the greater freedom, because, being a politician
myself, none can regard it as personal."

[Illustration: OLD SECOND PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS.

During the special session of the legislature convened in the fall of
1839 (the first one held at Springfield), the House of Representatives
occupied this church, the State House being unfinished. At the short
special session which opened November 23, 1840, the House first went
into the Methodist church, but on the second day Representative John
Logan (father of General John A. Logan) offered a resolution "that the
Senate be respectfully requested to exchange places of convening with