treasuries for its branches; a combined and concentrated money power would then be beheld, equal to all the existing banks with the United States Bank superadded. This tremendous power would be wielded by the Secretary of the Treasury under the immediate command of the President. Here would be a perfect union of the sword and the purse, — an actual, visible consolidation of the moneyed power. Who or what could withstand it? These states themselves would become suppliants at the feet of the Executive for a portion of the paper emissions. The day might come when the Senate of the United States would have “humbly to implore some future President to grant it money to pay the wages of its own sergeant-at-arms and doorkeeper.” He firmly believed that the enactment of the sub-treasury bill would be “fatal to the best interests of this country, and ultimately subversive of its liberties.”
In our days the sub-treasury system, in its essential features as originally designed, having so long been in practical operation, we find it difficult to understand how a mind like Clay's should have looked upon it with such extravagant apprehensions. But it is equally difficult to believe that these expressions of fear should have been mere dissimulation, or oratorical feint. Indeed, the solemnity with which he began his second speech on this subject, on February 19, 1838, stands perhaps without example in the annals of the Senate.
“I have seen some public service [he said], passed
