Article Text
[From the Albany Atlas, July 16.1 # The United States Bank. The Philadelphia papers announce that the Trustees of the bank of the United States will make their final dividend on the 20th of September, when the concern will cease in any shape to exist. It has taken fourteen years to wind up the concern; and at the end the stockholders lose all, and the other creditors get little. The bank was originally chartered at a period of great financial depression and distress; when the failure of the State banks, after the war, had deprived the people of a currency. The constitutional objections to its existence were lost sight of inthe desire to secure its advantages. The government became a holder of the stock to the amount of one-fifth of the capital; and received the deposits of the Custom House and the Land Office. When the question of its re-charter came up, the exigencies which had called it into existence had ceased, and the objections to it existed. The old Democrats, who never beleived that such an institution was embraced in the objects of the confederation or was to be endured under a Democratic interpretation of the Constitution, renewed their objections to its re-charter. Gen. Jackson believed, rightly, that what the public service required, could be rendered by an agency, more purely govermental, and which would not interfere or "regulate" the monetary affairs of the people. The Bank had assumed the function of a "regulator" of the credits of the country, and assumed to to hold a national jurisdiction over the State banks, while its own ministration was based on the same vicious system which made the local banks so often a delusion and a nuisance. How Mr. Biddle undertook to perpetuate his character by the purchase of presses and the bribery of politicians, is well known. With as much folly as wickedness he contended that banks had a right to expend the money of the institution in a warfare and upon the government, its leading stockholder. The panic, the distress committees, the suspension, the revolution, bloodless as yet," the attempt to controll the cotton market, the immense speculations of the bank followed. The energy and wisdom of Jackson and Van Burern were sucessful: and the monster prostrated; though in its fall it brought down State credit and cast the deed stain, not yet eradicated, upon the American name. But though thus defeated, it managed to perpetuate its infamy by a new phase of corruption. Under the pretence of "improving the common schools and assisting the internal improvements of Pennsylvania,' the old bank was re-chartered as a State institution, upon condition of immense largesses to the State, and after a well known expenditure of money among the members of the two Houses. But this concern could not corrupt itself. There is a law that regulates the intercourse of vice, and threatens it with dreadful punishment, having their source of mental foulness. The old Mother of Abomination was rotten to the bone. Patches and paint could not conceal the internal ravages, and, after wadling about a few years in bloated vice, she rolled over and died. There were gay young politicians that haunted the house she lived in. What are they? What did they become? The story has a moral in it, which Time has not failed to engrave deeply on the history of the country, where politicians may gather future instruction. It is that accumulation of wealth, however great, can hold an even contest with a free people; that corruption cannot reach the masses; and that politicians who ally themselves in a contest on the side of the associated wealth and monopoly, against ideas of popular liberty, and become suspected by the people, and no talents or virtue can outweigh the burden of this suspicion. BRAZIL AND THE SLAVE TRADE.-
