taxed and controlled the many without responsibility or restraint.  In that arrangement they conceived the strength of nations in war consisted.  There was also something fascinating in the ease, luxury, and display of the higher orders, who drew their wealth from the toil of the laboring millions.  The authors of the system drew their ideas of political economy from what they had witnessed in Europe, and particularly in Great Britain.  They had viewed the enormous wealth concentrated in few hands and had seen the splendor of the overgrown establishments of an aristocracy which was upheld by the restrictive policy.  They forgot to look down upon the poorer classes of the English population, upon whose daily and yearly labor the great establishments they so much admired were sustained and supported.  They failed to perceive that the scantily fed and half-clad operatives were not only in abject poverty, but were bound in chains of oppressive servitude for the benefit of favored classes, who were the exclusive objects of the care of the Government.

It was not possible to reconstruct society in the United States upon the European plan.  Here there was a written Constitution, by which orders and titles were not recognized or tolerated.  A system of measures was therefore devised, calculated, if not intended, to withdraw power gradually and silently from the States and the mass of the people, and by construction to approximate our Government to the European models, substituting an aristocracy of wealth for that of orders and titles.

Without reflecting upon the dissimilarity of our institutions and of the condition of our people and those of Europe, they conceived the vain idea of building up in the United States a system similar to that which they admired abroad.  Great Britain had a national bank of large capital, in whose hands was concentrated the controlling monetary and financial power of the nation—­an institution wielding almost kingly power, and exerting vast influence upon all the operations of trade and upon the policy of the Government itself.  Great Britain had an enormous public debt, and it had become a part of her public policy to regard this as a “public blessing.”  Great Britain had also a restrictive policy, which placed fetters and burdens on trade and trammeled the productive industry of the mass of the nation.  By her combined system of policy the landlords and other property holders were protected and enriched by the enormous taxes which were levied upon the labor of the country for their advantage.  Imitating this foreign policy, the first step in establishing the new system in the United States was the creation of a national bank.  Not foreseeing the dangerous power and countless evils which such an institution might entail on the country, nor perceiving the connection which it was designed to form between the bank and the other branches of the miscalled “American system,” but feeling the embarrassments of the Treasury and of the business