The Madisonian

THE SUB-TREASURY—THE WAR AGAINST THE BANKS.

The following, from the Raleigh, N. C. Star, paints in strong colors the policy and practice of the Sub-Treasury gentlemen. If there is in this country, men who are, or who would be aristocrats, it is those who are the advocates of the Sub-Treasury scheme.— That, if established, would create a despotism or a monarchy, and there cannot be any aristocracy where one or the other does not exist.

There is a party now rapidly gaining numbers in this country, which, under the guise of opposition to what they are pleased to term aristocracy and monopolies, are malignantly striking at the foundations of political and social order. Their strongholds are in the northern cities, among the low class of foreigners and natives, who know just as much about banks and corporations as an untutored African does of the highest of abstruse principles of mathematics. Yet these men have leaders, and their united influence is by no means contemptible.

Temporary in its existence, as this party will prove to be, yet the blighting effects which it may produce, demand that it should be crushed.

Such men may be every where known by their unqualified denunciations of corporations and systems for internal improvement, and by their loud cries for equal rights, and all that.

When and how have their rights been abridged?

Not by the banks, for their stock is mostly made up by the money of widows and orphans and the currency which they furnish the country is the very life of that commerce and those systems of private and public improvement which extend to them employment and subsistence. As to the cry of 'Aristocracy' and 'exclusive privileges,' we believe it to be the ebullition of an envious spirit, tossed upon the billows of its own madness, seethingly disorganizing, and tending to the overthrow of the republic.

Here we cannot have an aristocracy, nor can exclusive privileges be granted. The Constitution prohibits the creation of nobles, and to cry out aristocracy against an individual because he happens to inherit wealth, or because he acquired it by his own industry and talents, is the very essence of envy and injustice. What would they have the wealthy to do? Throw open their store houses to them, give them a share of their money and cattle, and place the unlettered in the highest seats of literature and learning?

Let them do this, and this mongrel party will eat up their substance, desecrate their hearths, altars and sanctuaries, and then very quietly wipe their mouths, and curse them because they had not more to give!

These men go for a specie currency—and why? Because they deal in nothing else, and hardly that. They cannot comprehend how nor why the notes of a bank command credit throughout the country; and hence, when their leaders cry out 'down with the banks,' they ignorantly applaud. Is not the Sub-Treasury scheme identified with this party?