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to be for the last time ; and, therefore, they should have been prepared to wind up. Of
this intention neither we nor, as we believe, the bank directors ever heard. But such an in-
tention only makes the course of the majority in Congress so much the more inexcusable, and
its oppression so much the more deliberate and cruel, not to the banks, but to the outraged peo-
ple. With such an intention in their minds, the majority were so much the more bound to
have provided against consequences by well-considered and digested plan for securing to the
people the indispensable advantages and facilities of banking in some form deemed more unex-
ceptionable than the existing banks.
It was a sufficient, and, perhaps, a questionable, stretch of power to have confined the trade
and business of banking to the incorporated banks; but to prohibit and exterminate that entire
branch of business in every form and modification of it, never before entered the head of any
sane and honest legislator in such a state of society as the present. A law prohibiting the trade
of a merchant, a carpenter, bricklayer, tailor, or shoemaker, or the professions of divinity, me-
dicine, or law, would be neither more absurd, nor more contrary to natural justice.
Now, fellow-citizens, look to yourselves. The State banks been included in, indeed, made
the principal butt of, all the most vehement denunciations on the floor of Congress against banks
and banking ; the chosen cover to the shame of repeated and signal disgraces from new-fangeled
and shallow projects of tampering with a currency which these projectors had found in the sound-
est condition, and with a system of finance approved by half a century of sage experience, and, when
first subjected to empirical treatment, flourising beyond all former example. It has been also
said openly on the floor of Congress, by men who, in our case, have been found potent in evil,
that Congress, in dealing with the District banks, should exhibit a model fit for the States to
follow in relation to their own banks. How soon the modesty of merely proposing models may
yield to the temptation of actually modelling State legislation or the creatures of State legislation,
evidently depends on the contingency of power and means. Specie circulars have run their
round ; sub-Treasury, yet in its cradle, and a bankrupt law, aimed specially at the banks, remain
to be tried ; and what other devices time and opportunity may develop, it would be vain to con-
jecture. One thing is certain, there has not been a pretext devised for suppressing the District
banks, that does not apply with equal, indeed, greater force to the State banks. The suspen-
sion of specie payments, the main pretext and the only one having any show of plausibilty,
came from the State banks to the District banks, who took it up at second-hand ; and if the
accessory is to be thus punished, what is in store for the principal ?
We desire to be understood as by no means imputing either the motives or acts of these
oppressive measures in relation to the banks, indiscriminately to all the members composing the
political party upon whom collectively such motives and acts are justly charged. We readily
admit some individual exceptions, which a reference to the journals and debates will enable you
easily to distinguish.
We come now, fellow-citizens, to the second head of our complaint---an attack upon the priv-
ileges of the people of Washington, and upon the most indispensible safeguards to the peace and
security of the city, so outrageous as to be incredible, unless it had been brought under our per-
sonal cognizance and experience, and vouched to the country by evidence enough to silence the
most willing skepticism. In this instance the sway of party-spirit, in its most concentrated es-
sence, was undisguised and evident in every thing, except in the disingenuous and deceptive means
by which it pursued its darkling way to its undeniable end. We proceed to a succinct history
of the origin and progress of this attempt, leaving the simple facts bespeak the motives and objects of its authors.
On the 1st of June last, the regular election of Mayor, Alderman, and Council, for the stated
term of two years, took place under the existing charter of the city. This election seemed, by
common consent, to have been made the test of the relative strength of parties in the city in re-
lation to the questions of general politics which divide the People of the Union ; and persons
entertaining opinions openly and firmly opposed to the course of the present Administration were
elected by a clear majority of two to one.
No sort of complaint---no whisper---no murmur, bringing any way into question the perfect
regularity and fairness of this election, was heard from any quarter. Disappointment and regret at
the political result, with the usual sense of mortification in the few personally interested in the event
of the contest, was the only feeling ever manifested by those who had desired and endeavored to
bring about a different result. They imagined not the folly of attempting, for any purpose of party
spite or political effect, to raise any controversy about an election so clearly unexceptionable ;
far less the atrocity of appealing to Congress to interfere and annul it by sheer force of legis-
lative enactment---by the force of law, no less lawless, in the eye of the natural and constitutional
justice, than the most brutish force which the law ever punished. If such an atrocity was ever
contemplated by any of our citizens, it must have been confined to a very few ; and those dark
conspirators, carrying on secret intrigues which they took care to hide from the general indigna-
tion and disgust which, at the first promulgation of such a design, would have burst in one united
voice from the mouths of all our citizens, with little or no distinction of political or municipal parties.
In a few days after the election, however, a petition was got up and presented to the Senate,
under circumstances which, taken in connexion with the subsequent action on it, raise well-
grounded suspicions of some dark intrigue, of which the agents have never been clearly developed.
This petition specified several alterations desired in the charter, the whole of which were against
the decided wishes of the great mass of the people, and some of them against the wishes of
13
many whose signatures were obtained by gross misrepresentations. But it contained not the re-
motest hint against the late election, or intimation of any design to bring it into any sort of
question. It set out with a misrepresentation so gross and palpable to every one acquainted
with the provisions of the existing charter as to make it altogether incredible that the framers
and promoters of the petition expected to deceive by it any member of Congress who would ex-
amine the charter, or that the mass of the members could be deceived by it, without the conni-
vance of the committee to whom the subject might be referred, and who could not proceed a step
in the examination without discovering the imposture. It might well serve the temporary purpose
of entrapping subscribers, careless as they are generally about such matters, and without the ready
means of detecting the misrepresentation in question, even if they had thought of the matter at all.
The misrepresentation alluded to consisted in this : that the city charter expired, by its own
limitation, in May, 1840, and, therefore, a renewal of the same must, from the necessity of the
case, be asked for. The obvious and necessary consequence from the strange circumstance of an
election under a charter expired the month before, is not insisted on, nor, in any sort, alluded to ;
all that matter is left, and, it is clear from all the circumstances, studiously and artfully left, to
silent implication and inference, to have its effect, without divulging the cause of such effect.
We have said the grossness of the deception must necessarily be palpable to any committee
that should go into any examination of the subject ; though with the connivance of the commit-
tee, it might pass on the mass of members who seldom examine into these local matters. If
this were not a thing of course, it is made more clear by the nature of the examination made
necessary by the terms of the petition itself ; which is not for a mere extension or renewal of
an expired charter, but for renewal with many important alterations incorporated into it, which
could not be effected without examination and comparison of the original charter; and at the first
glance it would be discovered that the charter, so far from having any limitation of time, partook
more of the character of a permanent law than any to be found in the statute book ; it was to
"continue in force for and during the term of twenty years, {from May 15, 1820,} and until
Congress shall, by law, determine otherwise ;" equivalent to declaring it irrevocable during that
term, and of indefinite continuance after.
The promoters of this petition, with all their exertions, fair and foul, to give it the imposing
appearance of numbers, obtained less than 400 signatures out of a population known to be 25,000 or more.
When this petition was presented to the Senate by the member selected to patronize it, a
novel and extraordinary course was taken with it. Instead of being referred to the standing
committee on the District of Columbia, as had invariably been the case with all petitions for local
objects from any part of the District, it was referred to a select committee, whereof Mr. NORVELL of Michigan, was chairman.
The bill reported by this select committee was very voluminous and elaborate, containing
some five or six sections more than the original charter; which, however, is taken for the frame
of the new one, with the alterations stated in the petition, and several others originating with
the committee, all elaborately interwoven with the substance of the existing charter ; a com-
parison between the two demonstrates an elaborate and minute examination of that charter by
the committee or its chairman who framed the new bill ; the very section declaring its continu-
ance for 20 years, with indefinite continuance afterwards till otherwise determined by law, is
taken up in the new bill, and altered to 10 years, with a reservation to Congress of the power to
alter or repeal it at any time. Yet this bill is entitled "to amend and continue in force the act
to incorporate the inhabitants of Washington ;" a strange title for a bill merely amending an exisitng act yet in full force, and requiring no other act to continue it in force; only subject,
like all other laws, to be altered or repealed by the legislature that enacted it: still stranger, as
the act, instead of being continued in force, as the title of the bill says, is expressly repealed by the
very terms of the same bill : a very suspicious title, too, when taken in connexion with the pal-
pable imposture, on that very head, in the petition; which should rather have been denounced
than thus implicitly countenanced by the chairman of the committee.
After some merely formal provisions in the first and second sections of the bill, the third comes
at once to the matter of the election, and, without any cause or reason assigned, proceeds,
without ceremony, to set that election aside, and direct a new one on the first Monday of October next.
Here, fellow-citizens, facts speak ; the wrong, the insult to this people, the motives to that
wrong, all stand out manifest, if not confessed. It is unnecessary to enlarge upon the circum-
stances or suspicions of low and discreditable artifices and deceptions that, if made out ever so
clear, could go but to aggravate and inflame superfluously what, upon great public grounds of na-
tural justice and constitutional right, ought alone to be sufficiently detestable to every good citizen of the Republic.
This bill was called up in the midst of the press and hurry of business, three or four days be-
fore the adjournment ; and, notwithstanding the general interdict laid upon District business in
general, was pressed upon the Senate by the chairman of the select committee and his friends
of the majority, and passed to a third reading. Notwithstanding the remonstrances of the mi-
nority, who urged the want of due deliberation on its voluminous provisions, the small number
of applicants for a new charter, and the manifest suprise upon the great mass of the people in-
terested, repeated motions from the minority to postpone it and lay it on the table were rejected.
The party for the bill seemed organized for the occasion, and it is well understood that the party
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