We need to be even more suspicious of banks than our ancestors were.
"The committee feel themselves compelled to go still further into a detail of the abuses inflicted on the public by a misuse of banking privileges.
Of all aristocracies none more completely enslave a people than that of money; and, in the opinion of your committee, no system was ever better devised so perfectly to enslave a community, as the present mode of conducting banking establishments. Like the Syren in the fable, they entice to destroy.
They hold the purse strings of society, and by monopolizing the whole of the circulating medium of the country, they form a precarious standard, by which all the property in the country, houses, lands, debts and credits, personal and real estate of all descriptions, are valued, thus rendering the whole community dependent on them, and proscribing every man who dares oppose or expose their unlawful practices: and if he happens lo be out of their reach so as to require no favor from them, then his friends are made the victims, so that no one dares complain.
...The committee, on taking a general view of the State, and comparing those parts where banks have been for some time established with those that had had none, are astonished at the alarming disparity. They see in the one case the desolation they have brought to an immense number of wealthy farmers, and they and their families suddenly hurled from wealth and independence into the abyss of ruin and despair."
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