Phenix Gazette

ALEXANDRIA, (D. C.)
WEDNESDAY MORNING, SEPT. 25, 1833

THE PRESIDENT'S MANIFESTO.

The Manifesto of the President against the Bank of the United States, is now before the public. We have no intention of criticising it, at length, or of entering into an elaborate review of its arguments or general train of reasoning. We write currente calamo, and give only brief views of our own opinions, to which we subjoin the observations of others.

It is a paper which is calculated to have, and will undoubtedly have, great weight and influence with the people. The writer, shrewd, cunning, and well informed, knew exactly what chords to make the President touch, to vibrate throughout the nation. It is, in reality, a most artful and ad captandum production; but seeming, as a vain, open, bold, and honest avowal of the President's determination, strengthened by convictions sincere and equally as honest, it addresses itself to the feelings and prejudices of all men, and yet in so specious a way as to make its appeals appear to be backed by Reason.

The propriety of the publication of such a document may well be doubted. It strikes us as exceedingly improper for the President to come forth in his own name, either in favor of or in opposition to any measure which may be discussed in his Cabinet. It would not answer to carry the principle out to any length whatever, and therefore we think the precedent dangerous.- The Manifesto would have been more appropriately placed, had it appeared in the columns of the Globe, semi-officially, without the President's signature. We proceed, however, to more important matters.

The charges against the Bank are in themselves not new, although some of the specifications meet us here for the first time; and admitting these to be just as they have been represented to the President, and that his views of them are correct, we recoil from attempting to justify or extenuate them. We disapprove of the course of the Directors in their resolutions throwing an unlimited amount of money into the hands of their President to circulate documents in favor of the Bank-of the large amount of money so expended-of the neglect exhibited towards the Government directors, &c. But the conclusion that we would arrive at in view of these facts, would be, not hostility to the institution itself, but, opposition to the administration of the institution. Provision could very easily be made in the charter of the Bank for preventing any such abuse of power or misconception of duty.

It will be observed that in these observations we go on the ground that the facts are precisely as they are stated in the Manifesto. The Bank may be able, and doubtless will attempt, satisfactorily to explain its conduct on these particulars. Generally, we may be allowed to say, that the reasoning of the Manifesto with regard to the right of the Directors to appropriate any money to be used in defence of the Bank, is most clearly erroneous. The Bank, assailed as it has been by the whole power of the Government, was bound to sustain itself. It was bound to take all lawful and proper means to secure its existence and benefit its stockholders. Not to have done so, would have been to subject the Directors to a charge of gross dereliction of duty and culpable neglect of those interests which have been confided to their care.

Not to continue, however, for the present our own desultory thoughts, which may be embodied and put on record, on some other occasion, we will content ourselves, for the present, with giving the comments of some of our cotemporaries on the document of which we have been speaking

The National Intelligencer says:-

"It abounds in misstatements of fact, and false inferences, which we shall hereafter expose. As a sample of its reasoning, we will only advert to the fallacy of the argument, on which the President rests his great argument, for justification for persisting in hostility to the Bank and for disregarding the voice of the Legislature in this his last assault on it. It is this, that "the President considers his re-election as a decision of the people against the Bank;" that in re-electing him the people ratified that hostility. This is absurdly making his re-election turn on a single point of the policy of his administration; but waiving this objection to it, how ill does the argument stand against the fact, that in large sections of the Union in which his re-election was most zealously supported, the Bank is most popular! In Pennsylvania, for instance, where the Legislature passed a unanimous vote for the charter of the Bank."

"One other general remark, and we dismiss the subject for to-day. It is to express our conviction that this is perhaps the most exceptionable and indefensible document that the President was ever induced to place his signature to. We do not speak of the indelicacy of the allegation, with which it sets out to assault upon the personal character of so able and estimable President of the Bank, nor of the recapitulation of a thousand disproved charges against the institution which have been, and formally scattered to the winds, by the most unrestricted and searching scrutiny of a committee of Congress after the proceedings of the Bank: It is not all these most concerned to see. It is the avowed disregard of all law but the law of his own will."

The tone of arrogance and contempt of the Legislature and must strike every independent mind with indignation which pervades the country.

It is avowed almost in terms, that it is of no consequence what the opinion and alarm of the people may be on any other provision of the law.

The obnoxious provision was 'an oversight in Congress?'

This is the summary mode by which the Executive evades the provisions and the inhibitions of the law. Are we to be a free country pro-

Cromwell of our day. Surely there be a redeeming spirit in the country, this last act of Executive aggression must rouse it into action.

By one of these strange anomalies, which seldom occur in the history of nations, we find the Executive and the bank at war with each other; to sanction the usurpations of the Executive, because we are opposed to the bank, would be to increase the power of the Executive, already so great, as to threaten the entire loss of liberty; and we are satisfied that to sanction the substitution of the State banks, under their present organization, will be to consolidate in the person of the Executive, all the powers now divided between the U. States Bank and the President.

And it is impossible not to see that this is the real question, which lies at the bottom of this movement. The bank has refused to enlist as a partisan in support of the re-election of Andrew Jackson, and Andrew Jackson has resolved that the bank shall be punished, and that in any bank which does not throw its whole weight into that political scale which he may wish to preponderate. After what we have seen, no one can misunderstand his declaration, that any interference in elections will be sufficient cause for withdrawing the deposites. By this he means, that the banks, in which the public deposites are made, which take part in the elections against the Executive will, must be punished, and others, who will conform in this respect, must be selected. Did he not lay down the same principle in regard to public officers, and do we not see the public offices filled with busy partisans, selected because they are partisans.

But then comes Brennus, with the sword of Power and throws it into the scale. The Globe says:-

'Yes, General Jackson has never made an appeal to his countrymen in vain. At New Orleans he said, Our country must and shall be defended,' and it was defended. When Nullification reared its bloody banner, he said, 'the Federal Union must be preserved,' and it was preserved. When the Bank is now assailing our institutions by corruption in a thousand insidious forms, he says, it must be destroyed, and IT WILL BE DESTROYED.'

And has it 'come to this complexion' at last?