I will not pursue the unhappy narrative of the latter part of the session of 1841.  Men had begun to grow excited and angry and resentful.  I expressed the opinion, at an early period, to all those to whom I was entitled to speak, that it would be a great deal better to forbear further action at present.  That opinion, as expressed to the two Whig Senators from Massachusetts, is before the public.  I wished Congress to give time for consultation to take place, for harmony to be restored; because I looked for no good, except from the united and harmonious action of all the branches of the Whig government.  I suppose that counsel was not good, certainly it was not followed.  I need not add the comment.

This brings us, as far as concerns the questions of currency, to the last session of Congress.  Early in that session the Secretary of the Treasury sent in a plan of an exchequer.  It met with little favor in either House, and therefore it is necessary for me, Gentlemen, lest the whole burden fall on others, to say that it had my hearty, sincere, and entire approbation.  Gentlemen, I hope that I have not manifested through my public life a very overweening confidence in my own judgment, or a very unreasonable unwillingness to accept the views of others.  But there are some subjects on which I feel entitled to pay some respect to my own opinion.  The subject of currency, Gentlemen, has been the study of my life.  Thirty years ago, a little before my entrance into the House of Representatives, the questions connected with a mixed currency, involving the proper relation of paper to specie, and the proper means of restricting an excessive issue of paper, came to be discussed by the most acute and well-disciplined understandings in England in Parliament.  At that time, during the suspension of specie payments by the bank, when paper was fifteen per cent below par, Mr. Vansittart had presented his celebrated resolution, declaring that a bank-note was still worth the value expressed on its face; that the bank note had not depreciated, but that the price of bullion had risen.  Lord Liverpool and Lord Castlereagh espoused this view, as we know, and it was opposed by the close reasoning of Huskisson, the powerful logic of Horner, and the practical sagacity and common sense of Alexander Baring, now Lord Ashburton.  The study of those debates made me a bullionist.  They convinced me that paper could not circulate safely in any country, any longer than it was immediately redeemable at the place of its issue.  Coming into Congress the very next year, or the next but one after, and finding the finances of the country in a most deplorable condition, I then and ever after devoted myself, in preference to all other public topics, to the consideration of the questions relating to them.  I believe I have read every thing of value that has been published since on those questions, on either side of the Atlantic.  I have studied by close observation the laws of paper