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answered this criticism by urging that banks do aid the farmer,
indirectly to be sure, by making advances to the merchants to
whom he sells his products, thus giving him a broader and
readier market.
Soon the indiscretion with which bankers in the earlier decades
permitted themselves to make loans of long duration gave farmers
another cause for complaint. A committee of the New York
legislature, in discussing banks in 1818, pictured “the ruin they
have brought on an immense number of the most wealthy farmers,
and they and their families suddenly hurled from wealth and independence
into the abyss of ruin and despair.” ? Niles repeatedly
warned the husbandman against the alluring pitfalls of
accommodation loans and easy renewals, and insisted that ‘“agriculturalists
should avoid banks as they would scorpions.” 3
The attack upon banks did not long content itself with the
assertion that they fail to benefit the farmer; their loans to merchants
were soon held to be in themselves baneful. Merchants
are useful while supplying a nation’s wants, one pamphleteer
maintained, but ‘dangerous whilst speculating indiscriminately
on foes and friends for the acquisition of wealth, and aspiring to
exclusive privileges and prerogatives.” If banks do enable merchants
to extend commerce, asserted one critic, it would be better
to bestow the capital on agriculture and manufactures, “which
alone create the real fund for an extension of commerce.” * Bank
loans are for too short periods, this writer believed, to be adapted
to any other use than speculation; indeed they convert merchants
from an honorable group of men, into “a set of contemptible
gamblers.” None but “speculating rogueries” could yield
proposed that the profit of banking be reduced so that some money would remain
for loans to farmers by individuals. Path to Riches (1794), p. 67.
! Morris, in Carey’s Debates and Proceedings (1786), pp. 93, 94; Webster, Essay
on Credit (1786), in Political Essays, p. 443; Paine, “ Dissertations on Government”
(1786), Writings, ii, 168.
* See Gouge, Short History of Paper Money and Banking in the United States
(1833), p- 5.
8 Niles’ Register (1829), xxxv, 346. Cp. Crawford, Report on the Currency
(1820), in American State Papers, Finance, iii, 498.
* Anon., Enquiry into the . . . Tendency of Public Measures (1794), p. 78.
