And as to the soundness of the currency, how does that stand?  Are the causes of alarm less now than in 1829?  Is there less bank paper in circulation?  Is there less fear of a general catastrophe?  Is property more secure, or industry more certain of its reward?  We all know, Gentlemen, that, during all this pretended warfare against all banks, banks have vastly increased.  Millions upon millions of bank paper have been added to the circulation.  Everywhere, and nowhere so much as where the present administration and its measures have been most zealously supported, banks have multiplied under State authority, since the decree was made that the Bank of the United States should be suffered to expire.  Look at Mississippi, Missouri, Louisiana, Virginia, and other States.  Do we not see that banking capital and bank paper are enormously increasing?  The opposition to banks, therefore, so much professed, whether it be real or whether it be but pretended, has not restrained either their number or their issues of paper.  Both have vastly increased.

And now a word or two, Gentlemen, upon this hard-money scheme, and the fancies and the delusions to which it has given birth.  Gentlemen, this is a subject of delicacy, and one which it is difficult to treat with sufficient caution, in a popular and occasional address like this.  I profess to be a bullionist, in the usual and accepted sense of that word.  I am for a solid specie basis for our circulation, and for specie as a part of the circulation, so far as it may be practicable and convenient.  I am for giving no value to paper, merely as paper.  I abhor paper; that is to say, irredeemable paper, paper that may not be converted into gold or silver at the will of the holder.  But while I hold to all this, I believe, also, that an exclusive gold and silver circulation is an utter impossibility in the present state of this country and of the world.  We shall none of us ever see it; and it is credulity and folly, in my opinion, to act under any such hope or expectation.  The States will make banks, and these will issue paper; and the longer the government of the United States neglects its duty in regard to measures for regulating the currency, the greater will be the amount of bank paper overspreading the country.  Of this I entertain not a particle of doubt.

While I thus hold to the absolute and indispensable necessity of gold and silver, as the foundation of our circulation, I yet think nothing more absurd and preposterous, than unnatural and strained efforts to import specie.  There is but so much specie in the world, and its amount cannot be greatly or suddenly increased.  Indeed, there are reasons for supposing that its amount has recently diminished, by the quantity used in manufactures, and by the diminished products of the mines.  The existing amount of specie, however, must support the paper circulations, and the systems of currency, not of the United States only,