Gentlemen, I will not say that some degree of pressure might not have come upon us, if the treasury order had not issued.  I will not say that there has not been over-trading, and over-production, and a too great expansion of bank circulation.  This may all be so, and the last-mentioned evil, it was easy to foresee, was likely to happen when the United States discontinued their own bank.  But what I do say is, that, acting upon the state of things as it actually existed, and is now actually existing the treasury order has been, and now is productive of great distress.  It acts upon a state of things which gives extraordinary force to its stroke, and extraordinary point to its sting.  It arrests specie, when the free use and circulation of specie are most important; it cripples the banks, at a moment when the banks more than ever need all their means.  It makes the merchant unable to remit, when remittance is necessary for his own credit, and for the general adjustment of commercial balances.  I am not now discussing the general question, whether prices must not come down, and adjust themselves anew to the amount of bullion existing in Europe and America.  I am dealing only with the measures of our own government on the subject of the currency, and I insist that these measures have been most unfortunate, and most ruinous in their effects on the ordinary means of our circulation at home, and on our ability of remittance abroad.

Their effects, too, on domestic exchanges, by deranging and misplacing the specie which is in the country, are most disastrous.  Let him who has lent an ear to all these promises of a more uniform currency see how he can now sell his draft on New Orleans or Mobile.  Let the Northern manufacturers and mechanics, those who have sold the products of their labor to the South, and heretofore realized the prices with little loss of exchange,—­let them try present facilities.  Let them see what reform of the currency has done for them.  Let them inquire whether, in this respect, their condition is better or worse than it was five or six years ago.

Gentlemen, I hold this disturbance of the measure of value, and the means of payment and exchange, this derangement, and, if I may so say, this violation of the currency, to be one of the most unpardonable of political faults.  He who tampers with the currency robs labor of its bread.  He panders, indeed, to greedy capital, which is keen-sighted, and may shift for itself; but he beggars labor, which is honest, unsuspecting, and too busy with the present to calculate for the future.  The prosperity of the working classes lives, moves, and has its being in established credit, and a steady medium of payment.  All sudden changes destroy it.  Honest industry never comes in for any part of the spoils in that scramble which takes place when the currency of a country is disordered.  Did wild schemes and projects ever benefit the industrious?  Did irredeemable bank paper ever enrich the laborious?  Did violent