Future Paper Money of This Country [pp. 1-25]

FUTURE PAPER MONVE Y OF THIS CO UVTRY.Y
burdening the cost of exchanges, which means ultimately the
cost of all articles of exchange to the consumer. It is vain to
say that the banks can and do stand it. The more they are
oppressively burdened, the less they will be multiplied and the
more they will be decreased. The facilities for exchange they
furnish, and the benefits of competition among them, will proportionally decline. The capital of the banks in New York
City was reduced by many millions in order to offset the taxation of their surplus, insisted on by assessors and sanctioned
by the courts. So the State lost both the taxes and the advantages of a large banking and loan capital too. Many places are
now deprived of the advantages of banking facilities on account
of the taxation which crushes them out. Multitudes are educated by demagogues and other blind guides to look at national
banks very much as a mad bull looks at a red flag. This infuriated spirit begets the most wild and frantic assaults upon them.
They feel in the same way about those other great instruments
of exchange, the railways. They might as well vent their spite
at steamships and other vehicles of transportation and exchange,
and bring back the glories of the "Age of Homespun," or of
simple barbarism. Let abuses be reformed. But reformation
is not destruction.
LYMAN H. ATWATER.
25