188 BANKING THEORIES IN UNITED STATES
of course, its best-known exponent.! President Monroe attributed
the “pressures” of 1819-1820 to ‘the peculiar character of the
epoch in which we live, and to the extraordinary occurrences
which have signalized it.” 2 Many traced the origin of the panic
of 1837 to Jackson’s war on the Bank, the specie circular, and
similar specific events, in terms that indicated no notion that
anything more might be said respecting the general nature of
crises. Thus a New York bankers’ convention, after enumerating
in its report the conditions responsible for the distress, remarked:
“Such a coincidence of extraordinary and unfortunate incidents,
as produced the catastrophe, must be rare, and may never again
occur.” 3 Superabundant crops, poor crops, excessive taxation,
and the “judgment of God,” are but a few of the long list of
causes advanced in explanation of our crises of before the Civil
War. De Bow ascribed the crisis of 1847 to the diversion of a
large amount of capital from commerce into railroad investments,
and thought that tariffs, inflation of bank credit, and like circumstances,
showed little correlation with the occurrences of crises.
“Let us alone,” was the best remedy he could suggest.” In the
opinion of Samuel Hurd Walley,
Crises and revulsions are the necessary incidents and concomitants of a
credit system; but they do not follow any known law, and cannot be subjected
to any such analysis of cause and effect as will enable the most sagacious
to understand and explain their mode of operation. There is no such settled
and acknowledged analogy between one revulsion and another as will enable
1 The Prospect . . . at the Opening of the Year 1851, p. 84; Financial Crises (1860),
pp. 8 ff. Carey was a free trader, despite the sentiments of his father, until about
1843. In Answers to the Questions, etc. (1840), p. 55, he contended that high duties,
rather than low ones, tend to produce crises. For further illustrations of the view
that crises accompany low tariffs, see Ward, ¢‘ Causes that Produced the Crisis of
1857,” Hunt's Merchants’ Magazine (1859), xl, 20; Taussig, Tariff History of the
United States (6th ed.), pp. 116-122.
2 Fourth Annual Message (Nov. 14, 1830), in Richardson’s Messages of the
Presidents, ii, 74.
3 Financial Register (1838), 1, 231.
4 Cp. the three-page enumeration of the suggestions advanced to the agents of the
Bureau of Labor as to the causes of industrial depressions, in the first annual report
of the Commissioner of Labor, entitled Industrial Depressions (1886), pp. 76-78.
5 De Bow’s Review (Dec. 1857), xxiii, 652-650.
