The Caledonian

We find the following extract of a letter from Washington, in the Middlebury People's Press.

".The avowed object of the sub-treasury bill, is to curtail the business of the country, reduce the currency, restrict credit, discountenance, if not root out the banks, and reduce the price of every species of property. Benton and his corps are for a currency exclusively metallic, though Buchanan, professes friendship for the banks if duly regulated. With the ultras, the main objects are the reduction of the currency and the prostration of the credit system. Immediate effects they disregard; but in prospective they discover an Eldorado; the land is to flow, not exactly with milk and honey, but with gold. The cotton growers are to receive the value of their cotton in gold, while the amount exported is to be increased. The west is to enhance its exportations of provisions, which is also to be paid in gold. As for New England, we are told that the reduction of prices; of raw material and labor; will enable the manufacturer to seek a foreign market, and thus gold is to flow into the north. Sad comfort for the wool grower and the laborer.

This is the theory of the friends of the project, who talk much of over action, credit, extravagance, undue expansion of paper currency, &c. &c., all of which are to be cured by this one sovereign remedy.

Now let me give you my own views of its operations. In the first place, the sudden contraction of the currency will ruin all the small manufacturers whose works must stop. Thus the price of wool which must fall in the first place, with every thing else, will be still farther reduced by reducing the demands. The business of our wool growers will be ruined. At the same time the operatives will be thrown out of employment and nobody will be benefitted unless it be the large capitalists, who may take advantage of this state of things to buy and hire cheap and perhaps monopolize the business of manufacturing in the country. But the great mass must suffer, and the prosperity of New England will be at an end.

In short, I anticipate a general stagnation of business and a general depreciation of property throughout the country. We feel it already and what is there to produce a better state of things?

I need not tell you that this will produce distress and ruin. The man in debt will find his debts doubled and will be insolvent, while every man who has made arrangements for the future will find his calculations and his hopes thwarted. There will be an end at once of our national and individual prosperity. You inquire if there is no hope. Yes, there is always hope where things get at the worst. But that hope is not to be found in the great Treasury Bank with which the Sub treasury bill is pregnant. It is too late to give relief by the issue of treasury notes; the operation cannot be brought about till the mischief is done. Besides the amount of treasury notes which can be issued will fall far short of the exigencies of the times. It is not in the power of the administration to prevent the immediate and fatal effects of their policy."