Southern Argus

Concerning the bill before the Mississippi Legislature to annul bank charters, the Madison Whig says:

Of the progress of business in our legislature, we cannot say much. The banks seem to occupy their attention more than any thing else, as they are now the theme of as much denunciation as the commission merchants of New Orleans were a year or two since. Now every demagogue mounts the stump with banks; the rascally banks—some of them are very rascally—when, two years since, our distresses were attributed to the rascally commission merchants of New Orleans. The distressed are willing to place the censure any where but upon their own, or the shoulders of the responsible parties. The bad currency, the loco focos say, is the cause of the distress, and that party are determined to make a showing, if nothing more, of their promises to reform it by legislative action;—to effect which, a bill of a very peculiar nature has been introduced into the Legislature, entitled "an act to repeal bank charters," but which should be more properly called an act to provide for and establish Executive patronage, to enable McNutt to feed his "long lean and lank" partizans, that, like ravenous birds, are hovering over their prey.

The bill proposes to take the management of the banks out of the hands of the stock-holders, and give them to the pets of McNutt.—Although we look upon the bill as the most outrageous, and opening the door to fraud, rascality and villany, yet we are not sure that such a step by the party, is not absolutely necessary to preserve our country. Partizan feeling has so biassed the judgments of men, that they can never be brought to see the hideous deformity of loco focoism until they are made to feel its effects.

During the canvass last year the spoilers were continually denouncing the whigs for "rag Barons" and promised, if elected, they would reform the currency, and drive the banks into honesty, and because the whig party would not agree in the manner the reform was to be effected, they were styled the "shinplaster party." We have frequently stated that the issue was fairly made before the people on the currency question—the ways of reform proposed by each party—and that if the loco focos were elected, that they were compelled by the voice of the people to redeem their promises. They have a majority, a full and heavy majority now let them, if they dare, carry out their plan of reform—let them repeal all bank charters and they will do more than the whigs believed they intended, and at the same time let them provide for the thousand hungry, starving, floating, loathsome unprincipled parasites of Gov. McNutt—then they will have done what the whigs believed them capable of but without the courage to execute—then will they stand free of the crime of hypocrisy, but marked as the objects of detestation by the honest and enlightened of all parties, and the bitter execration of their dupes. Come ye loco foco Legislators, you have no means of escape—either prove that you are vile demagogues, unscrupulous hypocrites, by failing to repeal all bank charters, or screw your courage to the "sticking point" and perform your unholy acts of desecration of private rights and private property and stop not then but render the measure of your infamy full, by providing for the jackals that surround a pampered Executive.