of capitalists, caused a rush to be made to the legislatures of the respective States for similar acts of incorporation, which by many of the States, under a temporary infatuation, were readily granted, and thus the augmentation of the circulating medium, consisting almost exclusively of paper, produced a most fatal delusion.  An illustration derived from the land sales of the period alluded to will serve best to show the effect of the whole system.  The average sales of the public lands for a period of ten years prior to 1834 had not much exceeded $2,000,000 per annum.  In 1834 they attained in round numbers to the amount of $6,000,000; in the succeeding year of 1835 they reached $16,000,000, and the next year of 1836 they amounted to the enormous sum of $25,000,000, thus crowding into the short space of three years upward of twenty-three years’ purchase of the public domain.  So apparent had become the necessity of arresting this course of things that the executive department assumed the highly questionable power of discriminating in the funds to be used in payment by different classes of public debtors—­a discrimination which was doubtless designed to correct this most ruinous state of things by the exaction of specie in all payments for the public lands, but which could not at once arrest the tide which had so strongly set in.  Hence the demands for specie became unceasing, and corresponding prostration rapidly ensued under the necessities created with the banks to curtail their discounts and thereby to reduce their circulation.  I recur to these things with no disposition to censure preexisting Administrations of the Government, but simply in exemplification of the truth of the position which I have assumed.  If, then, any fiscal agent which may be created shall be placed, without due restrictions, either in the hands of the administrators of the Government or those of private individuals, the temptation to abuse will prove to be resistless.  Objects of political aggrandizement may seduce the first, and the promptings of a boundless cupidity will assail the last.  Aided by the experience of the past, it will be the pleasure of Congress so to guard and fortify the public interests in the creation of any new agent as to place them, so far as human wisdom can accomplish it, on a footing of perfect security.  Within a few years past three different schemes have been before the country.  The charter of the Bank of the United States expired by its own limitations in 1836.  An effort was made to renew it, which received the sanction of the two Houses of Congress, but the then President of the United States exercised his veto power and the measure was defeated.  A regard to truth requires me to say that the President was fully sustained in the course he had taken by the popular voice.  His successor to the chair of state unqualifiedly pronounced his opposition to any new charter of a similar institution, and not only the popular election which brought him into power, but the elections through