but of other nations also.  One of its great uses is to pass from country to country, for the purpose of settling occasional balances in commercial transactions.  It always finds its way, naturally and easily, to places where it is needed for these uses.  But to take extraordinary pains to bring it where the course of trade does not bring it, where the state of debt and credit does not require it to be, and then to endeavor, by unnecessary and injurious regulations, treasury orders, accumulations at the mint, and other contrivances, there to retain it, is a course of policy bordering, as it appears to me, on political insanity.  It is boasted that we have seventy-five or eighty millions of specie now in the country.  But what more senseless, what more absurd, than this boast, if there is a balance against us abroad, of which payment is desired sooner than remittances of our own products are likely to make that payment?  What more miserable than to boast of having that which is not ours, which belongs to others, and which the convenience of others, and our own convenience also, require that they should possess?  If Boston were in debt to New York, would it be wise in Boston, instead of paying its debt, to contrive all possible means of obtaining specie from the New York banks, and hoarding it at home?  And yet this, as I think, would be precisely as sensible as the course which the government of the United States at present pursues.  We have, beyond all doubt, a great amount of specie in the country, but it does not answer its accustomed end, it does not perform its proper duty.  It neither goes abroad to settle balances against us, and thereby quiet those who have demands upon us; nor is it so disposed of at home us to sustain the circulation to the extent which the circumstances of the times require.  A great part of it is in the Western banks, in the land offices, on the roads through the wilderness, on the passages over the Lakes, from the land offices to the deposit banks, and from the deposit banks back to the land offices.  Another portion is in the hands of buyers and sellers of specie; of men in the West, who sell land-office money to the new settlers for a high premium Another portion, again, is kept in private hands, to be used when circumstances shall tempt to the purchase of lands.  And, Gentlemen, I am inclined to think, so loud has been the cry about hard money, and so sweeping the denunciation of all paper, that private holding, or hoarding, prevails to some extent in different parts of the country.  These eighty millions of specie, therefore, really do us little good.  We are weaker in our circulation, I have no doubt, our credit is feebler, money is scarcer with us, at this moment, than if twenty millions of this specie were shipped to Europe, and general confidence thereby restored.