Banking theories in the United States before 1860

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1755492553

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-133529

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Miller, Harry Edward http://d-nb.info/gnd/1055250875

Title:: Banking theories in the United States before 1860

Place of publication:: Cambridge

Publisher:: Harvard University Press

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: XI, 240 S.

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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4 BANKING THEORIES IN. UNITED STATES century, showed that they understood the quantity theory, still retained with it this crude idea of a given volume of media of payment that would “fill the channels of circulation.” Throughout most of the period, indeed, the problems that were discussed were more like those which had concerned Smith than the new ones to which the contemporary discussion in England had advanced. Quotations from English works were still pre- ponderantly from the early master! The noteworthy debates aroused by the British Restriction Period were not without their influence in America, especially in the latter decades; but, with few exceptions (in particular, Colwell’s Ways and Means of Pay- ment), its more subtle aspects found little counterpart here. The American theory remained, on the whole, less sophisticated than the English. Not that there was lack of progress. About 1820 the con- sideration of banking became more philosophical. Hitherto nearly all the writings had been distinctly occasional, called forth from hurried pens by some special question of the day. First we have the controversy in Philadelphia precipitated in 1785-1786 with respect to the Bank of North America; then Hamilton’s Report on a National Bank and the arguments centering around the Bank of the United States; next, the problems of suspended specie payments, beginning in 1814. To be sure, it was in just such an atmosphere that the English writers had contributed so markedly to the progress of banking principles. But our problem was different: we were too new at the business of banking to de- velop sound theories at first hand; our experience had been too 1 As late as 1837 the scholarly Senator Rives of Virginia declared Smith to be the best authority upon currency problems, and asserted that “the general prin- ciples he has laid down on the subjects of banking and currency continue still to be appealed to by the enlightened writers who have followed him, as affording the soundest exposition of those subjects, whatever modifications of subordinate points may have been made by subsequent inquirers.” William Cabell Rives, Speech in the Senate on the Currency of the United States (January 10, 1837), pp. 6, 7. Not all the unlearned writers were as candid as one pamphleteer of 1826, who pleaded that any error in his argument be attributed “to the head and not to the heart,” since his knowledge of the subject of banking, like that of a purchaser “sight unseen,” was “more from the outside of books than a correct knowledge of their content.”

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