Source:
Jackson's Farewell Address, 1837
.
. . We are not left to conjecture how the moneyed power, thus organized and
with such a weapon in its hands, would be likely to use it. The distress and alarm
which pervaded and agitated the whole country when the Bank of the United
States waged war upon the people in order to compel them to submit to its
demands cannot yet be forgotten. The ruthless and unsparing temper with which
whole cities and communities were oppressed, individuals impoverished and
ruined, and a scene of cheerful prosperity suddenly changed into one of gloom
and despondency ought to be indelibly impressed on the memory of the people of
the United States.
If
such was its power in a time of peace, what would it not have been in a season
of war with an enemy at your doors? No nation but the freemen of the United
States could have come out victorious from such a contest; yet, if you had not
conquered, the government would have passed from the hands of the many to the
hands of the few; and this organized money power, from its secret conclave,
would have dictated the choice of your highest officers and compelled you to
make peace or war as best suited their own wishes. The forms of your government
might, for a time, have remained; but its living spirit would have departed
from it. . . .
Defeated
in the general government, the same class of intriguers and politicians will
now resort to the states and endeavor to obtain there the same organization
which they failed to perpetuate in the Union; and with specious and deceitful
plans of public advantages and state interests and state pride they will
endeavor to establish, in the different states, one moneyed institution with
overgrown capital and exclusive privileges sufficient to enable it to control
the operations of the other banks. Such an institution will be pregnant with
the same evils produced by the Bank of the United States, although its sphere
of action is more confined; and in the state in which it is chartered the money
power will be able to embody its whole strength and to move together with
undivided force to accomplish any object it may wish to attain. You have
already had abundant evidence of its power to inflict injury upon the agricultural,
mechanical, and laboring classes of society, and over those whose engagements
in trade or speculation render them dependent on bank facilities, the dominion
of the state monopoly will be absolute, and their obedience unlimited. With
such a bank and a paper currency, the money power would, in a few years, govern
the state and control its measures; and if a sufficient number of states can be
induced to create such establishments, the time will soon come when it will
again take the field against the United States and succeed in perfecting and
perpetuating its organization by a charter from Congress.
It
is one of the serious evils of our present system of banking that it enables
one class of society, and that by no means a numerous one, by its control over
the currency to act injuriously upon the interests of all the others and to
exercise more than its just proportion of influence in political affairs. The
agricultural, the mechanical, and the laboring classes have little or no share
in the direction of the great moneyed corporations; and from their habits and
the nature of their pursuits, they are incapable of forming extensive
combinations to act together with united force. . . .
The
planter, the farmer, the mechanic, and the laborer all know that their success
depends upon their own industry and economy and that they must not expect to
become suddenly rich by the fruits of their toil. Yet these classes of society
form the great body of the people of the United States; they are the bone and
sinew of the country; men who love liberty and desire nothing but equal rights
and equal laws and who, moreover, hold the great mass of our national wealth .
. . .