Intimately connected, Sir, with this topic, is another which has been brought into the debate; I mean the evil so much complained of, the exportation of specie.  We hear gentlemen imputing the loss of market at home to a want of money, and this want of money to the exportation of the precious metals.  We hear the India and China trade denounced, as a commerce conducted on our side, in a great measure, with gold and silver.  These opinions, Sir, are clearly void of all just foundation, and we cannot too soon get rid of them.  There are no shallower reasoners than those political and commercial writers who would represent it to be the only true and gainful end of commerce, to accumulate the precious metals.  These are articles of use, and articles of merchandise, with this additional circumstance belonging to them, that they are made, by the general consent of nations, the standard by which the value of all other merchandise is to be estimated.  In regard to weights and measures, something drawn from external nature is made a common standard, for the purposes of general convenience:  and this is precisely the office performed by the precious metals, in addition to those uses to which, as metals, they are capable of being applied.  There may be of these too much or too little in a country at a particular time, as there may be of any other articles.  When the market is overstocked with them, as it often is, their exportation becomes as proper and as useful as that of other commodities, under similar circumstances.  We need no more repine, when the dollars which have been brought here from South America are despatched to other countries, than when coffee and sugar take the same direction.  We often deceive ourselves, by attributing to a scarcity of money that which is the result of other causes.  In the course of this debate, the honorable member from Pennsylvania[7] has represented the country as full of every thing but money.  But this I take to be a mistake.  The agricultural products, so abundant in Pennsylvania, will not, he says, sell for money; but they will sell for money as quick as for any other article which happens to be in demand.  They will sell for money, for example, as easily as for coffee or for tea, at the prices which properly belong to those articles.  The mistake lies in imputing that to want of money which arises from want of demand.  Men do not buy wheat because they have money, but because they want wheat.  To decide whether money be plenty or not, that is, whether there be a large portion of capital unemployed or not, when the currency of a country is metallic, we must look, not only to the prices of commodities, but also to the rate of interest.  A low rate of interest, a facility of obtaining money on loans, a disposition to invest in permanent stocks, all of which are proofs that money is plenty, may nevertheless often denote a state not of the highest prosperity.  They may, and often do, show a want of employment for capital;