A fellow traveler sent the following collection of quotations to me. They are all on the subjects of economics and the Federal Reserve – ones he understands quite well as an accountant and CFO of a 1,830-employee corporation.
“The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.”
Lord Acton
“All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, so much as downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.”
John Adams, (1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
in a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1787
“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
Henry Ford
“The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.”
John Kenneth Galbraith, (1908-2006) Canadian-born economist, Harvard professor
Money: Whence it came, where it went – 1975, p15
“Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.”
James Garfield, (1831-1881) 20th President of the United States (1881)
“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. … This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the
way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.”
Alan Greenspan, (1926- ) Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (1987-2006)
from page 101 of the book “Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal” by Ayn Rand with additional articles by Alan Greenspan – 1966
“With the exception only of the period of the gold standard, practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money to defraud and plunder the people.”
Friedrich von Hayek
“The bold effort the present bank had made to control the government … are but premonitions of the fate that await the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it.”
Andrew Jackson, (1767-1845) 7th US President
To Congress in 1836, Jackson closed the second Federal Bank (est. 1816) with these comments
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a moneyed aristocracy that has set the Government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored
to the people to whom it properly belongs.”
Thomas Jefferson, (1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Letter to the Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin (1802)
“The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”
Vladimir Lenin
“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalistic System was to debauch the currency… Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million can diagnose.”
John Maynard Keynes
The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1920, page 235
“History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments
by controlling the money and its issuance.”
James Madison, (1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
“I believe that if the people of this nation fully understood what Congress has done to them over the last 49 years, they would move on Washington; they would not wait for an election… It adds up to a preconceived plan to destroy the economic and social independence of the United States!”
George W. Malone, (1890-1961) U.S. Senator (Nevada)
1957 speaking before Congress
“What is needed here is a return to the Constitution of the United States. We need to have a complete divorce of Bank and State. The old struggle that was fought out here in Jackson’s day must be fought over again… The Federal Reserve Act should be repealed and the Federal Reserve Banks, having violated their charters, should be liquidated immediately. Faithless Government officers who have violated their oaths of office should be impeached and brought to trial. Unless this is done by us, I predict that the American people, outraged, robbed, pillaged, insulted, and betrayed as they are in their own land, will rise in their wrath and send a President here who will sweep the money changers out of the temple.”
Louis McFadden, 1876-1936) US Congressman (R-PA) (1915-1935), Chairman of House Banking and Currency Committee. Poisoned in 1936.
Speech in Congress, June 10, 1932
“This Act (the Federal Reserve Act, Dec. 23rd 1913) establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President signs this bill, the invisible government by the Monetary Power will be legalized. The people may not know it immediately, but the day of reckoning is only a few years removed. The trusts will soon realize that they have gone too far even for their own good. The people must make a declaration of independence to relieve themselves from the Monetary Power. This they will be able to do by taking control of Congress. Wall Streeters could not cheat us if you Senators and Representatives did not make a humbug of Congress… The greatest crime of Congress is its currency system. The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking bill. The caucus and the party bosses have again operated and prevented the people from getting the benefit of their own government.”
Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., (1859-1924) Congressman (R-MN), father of famous aviator
December 22, 1913, the day before President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act, in a speech before the House of Representatives
“I am afraid that the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can and do create and destroy money. And they who control the credit of a nation direct the policy of governments, and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people.”
Reginald McKenna, (1863-1943) British Secretary to the Treasury (1903), President of the Board of Education (1907–08) First Lord of the Admiralty (1908–1911), Home Secretary (1911–1915) and Chancellor of the Exchequer (1915–1916), and Chairman of the Midland Bank (1918)
Speaking in 1924
“The ruling class has the schools and press under its thumb. This enables it to sway the emotions of the masses.”
Albert Einstein
“No legal tender law is ever needed to make men take good money; its only use is to make them take bad money.”
Steven T. Byington
September 1895, American Federationist
“The legal tender quality [of money] is only valuable for the purposes of dishonesty.”
Justice Salmon Chase, Chief Justice, formerly Secretary of Treasury in President Lincoln’s administration
in dissent of Knox vs. Lee (The Legal Tender Cases, 1871)
“The power to determine the quantity of money… is too important, too pervasive, to be exercised by a few people, however public-spirited, if there is any feasible alternative. There is no need for such arbitrary power… Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes – excusable or not – can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic – this is the key political argument against an independent central bank.”
Milton Friedman, (1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan
“Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders. The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited.
It operates outside of the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States.”
Barry Goldwater, (1909-1998) US Senator (R-Arizona)
“Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world.”
Alan Greenspan, (1926- ) Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (1987-2006)
Testimony before US House Banking Committee, May 1999
“The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities states and nation. At the head is a small group of banking houses generally referred to as ‘international bankers.’ This little coterie… run our government for their own selfish ends. It operates under cover of a self-created screen…[and] seizes…our executive officers… legislative bodies…schools… courts… newspapers and every agency created for the public protection.”
John F. Hylan,(1868-1936), Mayor of New York City (1918-1925), nicknamed “Red Mike”
“You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the grace of the Eternal God, will rout you out.”
Andrew Jackson, (1767-1845) 7th US President
upon evicting from the Oval Office a delegation of international bankers discussing the Bank Renewal Bill, 1832
“[The] Bank of the United States… is one of the most deadly hostility existing, against the principles and form of our Constitution… An institution like this, penetrating by its branches every part of the Union, acting by command and in phalanx, may, in a critical moment, upset the government. I deem no government safe which is under the vassalage of any self-constituted authorities, or any other authority than that of the nation, or its regular functionaries. What an obstruction could not this bank of the United States, with all its branch banks, be in time of war! It might dictate to us the peace we should accept, or withdraw its aids. Ought we then to give further growth to an institution so powerful, so hostile?”
Thomas Jefferson, (1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Thomas Jefferson did write this (about Banks) to Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin in 1803
“The dirty little secret is that both houses of Congress are irrelevant. … America’s domestic policy is now being run by Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, and America’s foreign policy is now being run by the International Monetary Fund [IMF]. …when the president decides to go to war, he no longer needs a declaration of war from Congress.”
Robert Reich, US Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton
January 7, 1999 issue of USA Today
“Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes the laws.”
Mayer Amschel Rothschild, [Mayer Amschel Bauer] (1744 -1812), Godfather of the Rothschild Banking Cartel of Europe.
In ‘The Creature from Jekyll Island’ (American Opinion Publishing), p. 218
“Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of Bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits.”
Sir Josiah Stamp, (1880-1941) President of the Bank of England in the 1920’s, the second richest man in Britain
Speaking at the Commencement Address of the University of Texas in 1927
“A great industrial nation is controlled by it’s system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the world–no longer a government of free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men.”
President Woodrow Wilson
“Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the Field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”
Woodrow Wilson,The New Freedom (1913)
“The Trilateral Commission is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States. The Trilateral Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power political, monetary, intellectual and ecclesiastical. What the Trilateral Commission intends is to create a worldwide economic power superior to the political governments of the nationstates involved. As managers and creators of the system ,they will rule the future.”
U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater in his l964 book: With No Apologies.
“The powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements, arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the worlds’ central banks which were themselves private corporations. The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups.”
Tragedy and Hope: A History of The World in Our Time (Macmillan Company, 1966,) Professor Carroll Quigley of Georgetown University, highly esteemed by his former student, William Jefferson Blythe Clinton.
“We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the work is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries.”
David Rockefeller, founder of the Trilateral Commission,
in an address to a meeting of The Trilateral Commission, in June, 1991.
“Once a nation parts with the control of its currency and credit, it matters not who makes the nations laws. Usury, once in control, will wreck any nation. Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of parliament and of democracy is idle and futile.”
William Lyon Mackenzie King, (1874-1950) Prime Minister of Canada
1935
“I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire, …The man that controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire. And I
control the money supply.”
Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild, (1777-1836) London financier, one of the founders of the international Rothschild banking dynasty
“Our whole monetary system is dishonest, as it is debt-based… We did not vote for it. It grew upon us gradually but markedly since 1971 when the commodity-based system was abandoned”
The Earl of Caithness
in a speech to the House of Lords, 1997
“The death of Lincoln was a disaster for Christendom. There was no man in the United States great enough to wear his boots and the bankers went anew to grab the riches. I fear that foreign bankers with their craftiness and tortuous tricks will entirely control the exuberant riches of America and use it to systematically corrupt civilisation.”
Otto Von Bismarck, (1815-1898) Founder of the German Empire, Prime minister of Prussia, Germany’s First Chancellor
After the Lincoln assassination
“A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom.”
Woodrow Wilson, (1856-1924) 28th US President
in his book, The New Freedom: A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People, chapter 8
“… we conclude that the [Federal] Reserve Banks are not federal …but are independent privately owned and locally controlled corporations…without day to day direction from the federal government.”
9th circuit court
Lewis vs United States, June 24, 1982
“When you or I write a check there must be sufficient funds in our account to cover that check, but when the Federal Reserve writes a check, it is creating money.”
Boston Federal Reserve Bank
in a publication titled “Putting It Simply”
“The power to determine the quantity of money… is too important, too pervasive, to be exercised by a few people, however public-spirited, if there is any feasible alternative. There is no need for such arbitrary power… Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes – excusable or not – can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic – this is the key political argument against an independent central bank.”
Milton Friedman, (1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan
“The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.”
John Kenneth Galbraith, (1908-2006) Canadian-born economist, Harvard professor
Money: Whence it came, where it went – 1975, p29
“Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders. The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited.
It operates outside of the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States.”
Barry Goldwater, (1909-1998) US Senator (R-Arizona)
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money,
first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”
Thomas Jefferson, (1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
in 1802 in a letter to then Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin
“By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”
John Maynard Keynes
“The Economic Consequences Of The Peace”
“The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.”
William Paterson, (1658-1719) Founder of the Bank of England in 1694, the privately owned central bank for the Kingdom of England.
“In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press. … They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.”
Congressional Record of February 9, 1917, page 2947, as entered by Representative Oscar Callaway of Texas
“I am myself persuaded, on the basis of extensive study of the historical evidence, that… the severity of each of the contractions – 1920-21, 1929-33, and 1937-38 – is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities and would not have occurred under earlier monetary and banking arrangements.”
Milton Freidman, (1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan
‘Capitalism and Freedom’
“Nothing did more to spur the boom in stocks than the decision made by the New York Federal Reserve bank, in the spring of 1927, to cut the rediscount rate. Benjamin Strong, Governor of the bank, was chief advocate of this unwise measure, which was taken largely at the behest of Montagu Norman of the Bank of England… At the time of the Banks action I warned of its consequences… I felt that sooner or later the market had to break.”
Bernard Baruch, (1870-1965) American financier, stock market speculator, and presidential adviser to Woodrow Wilson and FDR
in Baruch: The Public Years (1960)
“The Great Depression was not caused by laissez faire but by the actions of well-intended politicians and bureaucrats. The Federal Reserve System, after all, was not created in response to the Great Depression, but in 1913. Soon thereafter it began experimenting with its awesome powers, expanding the money supply during the roaring ‘20s, propping up the pound sterling in London, extending credit so Europeans could buy American agricultural products. All the while, Congress was becoming more and more protectionist. When the Fed reversed policies in 1929 and actually shrunk the money supply by a third over the next three years and Congress culminated its protectionist tendencies with the Smoot-Hawley tariff, the collapse was underway. The fact that Hoover then raised taxes and Roosevelt kept wages artificially high guaranteed the massive unemployment that marked the 1930s. Government caused and exacerbated the Great Depression.”
Edward H. Crane, Founder and president of the CATO institute
April 6, 1995, at a meeting of the Philanthropy Roundtable
“Commercial banks create checkbook money whenever they grant a loan,
simply by adding new deposit dollars in accounts on their books in exchange for a borrower’s IOU.”
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
I Bet You Thought, p.19 (1977) Published by The Federal Reserve Bank of New York
“Because of ‘fractional’ reserve system, banks, as a whole, can expand our money supply several times, by making loans and investments.”
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
The Story of Banks, p.5. (2006), Story by Gail Donovan; Art by Norman Nodel, Published by Federal Reserve Bank of New York
“The decrease in purchasing power incurred by holders of money due to inflation imparts gains to the issuers of money…”
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
Review, Nov. 1975, p.22, Published by The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
“We have stricken the shackles from 4,000,000 human beings and brought all labourers to a common level, but not so much by the elevation of former slaves as by reducing the whole working population, white and black, to a condition of serfdom. While boasting of our noble deeds, we are careful to conceal the ugly fact that by our iniquitous money system we have manipulated a system of oppression which, though more refined, is no less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery.”
Horace Greeley, (1811-1872) Editor of the New York Tribune, ran against Ulysses Grant for presidency
1872, in reference to the National Bank Act of 1863
“The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is eager to enter into close relationship with the Bank for International Settlements…. The conclusion is impossible to escape that the State and Treasury Departments are willing to pool the banking system of Europe and America, setting up a world financial power independent of and above the Government of the United States…. The United States under present conditions will be transformed from the most active of manufacturing nations into a consuming and importing nation with a balance of trade against it.”
Louis McFadden, 1876-1936) US Congressman (R-PA) (1915-1935), Chairman of House Banking and Currency Committee. Poisoned in 1936.
quoted in the New York Times (June 1930)
“The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank…sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.”
Carroll Quigley, (1910-1977) Professor of History at Georgetown University, member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), mentor to Bill Clinton
in his book Tragedy and Hope, 1966, pg 324
“When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.”
Napolean Bonaparte
“100% of what is collected is absorbed solely by interest on the Federal Debt …
all individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services taxpayers expect from government.”
Grace Commission
report submitted to President Ronald Reagan on January 15, 1984
Congressman Patman: “How did you get the money to buy those two billion dollars worth of Government securities in 1933?”
Governor Eccles: “Out of the right to issue credit money.”
Patman: “And there is nothing behind it, is there, except our Government’s credit?”
Eccles: “That is what our money system is. If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn’t be any money.”
Congressman Fletcher: “Chairman Eccles, when do you think there is a possibility of returning to a free and open market, instead of this pegged and artificially controlled financial market we now have?”
Governor Eccles: “Never, not in your lifetime or mine.”
These statements were made during hearings of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, September 30, 1941. Members of the Federal Reserve Board call themselves “Governors.” Governor Marriner Eccles was Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board at the time of these hearings.
“Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are U.S. government institutions. They are not……..they are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the U.S. for the benefit of themselves and their foreign and domestic swindlers, and rich and predatory money lenders. The sack of the United States by the Fed is the greatest swindle in history. Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers, but the truth is the Fed has usurped the government. It controls everything here and it controls all of our foreign relations. It makes and breaks governments at will.”
Congressman Louis McFadden, Chairman, House Banking and Currency Committee, June 10, 1932
Andrew Jackson’s Bank Veto Message, July 10, 1832
The present corporate body, denominated the president, directors, and company of the Bank of the United States, will have existed at the time this act is intended to take effect twenty years. It enjoys an exclusive privilege of banking under the authority of the General Government, a monopoly of its favor and support, and, as a necessary consequence, almost a monopoly of the foreign and domestic exchange. The powers, privileges, and favors bestowed upon it in the original charter, by increasing the value of the stock far above its par value, operated as a gratuity of many millions to the stockholders….
The act before me proposes another gratuity to the holders of the same stock, and in many cases to the same men, of at least seven millions more….It is not our own citizens only who are to receive the bounty of our Government. More than eight millions of the stock of this bank are held by foreigners. By this act the American Republic proposes virtually to make them a present of some millions of dollars.
Every monopoly and all exclusive privileges are granted at the expense of the public, which ought to receive a fair equivalent. The many millions which this act proposes to bestow on the stockholders of the existing bank must come directly or indirectly out of the earnings of the American people….
It appears that more than a fourth part of the stock is held by foreigners and the residue is held by a few hundred of our own citizens, chiefly of the richest class.
Is there no danger to our liberty and independence in a bank that in its nature has so little to bind it to our country? The president of the bank has told us that most of the State banks exist by its forbearance. Should its influence become concentered, as it may under the operation of such an act as this, in the hands of a self-elected directory whose interests are identified with those of the foreign stockholders, will there not be cause to tremble for the purity of our elections in peace and for the independence of our country in war? Their power would be great whenever they might choose to exert it; but if this monopoly were regularly renewed every fifteen or twenty years on terms proposed by themselves, they might seldom in peace put forth their strength to influence elections or control the affairs of the nation. But if any private citizen or public functionary should interpose to curtail its powers or prevent a renewal of its privileges, it can not be doubted that he would be made to feel its influence.
It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society the farmers, mechanics, and laborers who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government. There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing. In the act before me there seems to be a wide and unnecessary departure from these just principles.
Nor is our Government to be maintained or our Union preserved by invasions of the rights and powers of the several States. In thus attempting to make our General Government strong we make it weak. Its true strength consists in leaving individuals and States as much as possible to themselves in making itself felt, not in its power, but in its beneficence; not in its control, but in its protection; not in binding the States more closely to the center, but leaving each to move unobstructed in its proper orbit.
Experience should teach us wisdom. Most of the difficulties our Government now encounters and most of the dangers which impend over our Union have sprung from an abandonment of the legitimate objects of Government by our national legislation, and the adoption of such principles as are embodied in this act. Many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richer by act of Congress. By attempting to gratify their desires we have in the results of our legislation arrayed section against section, interest against interest, and man against man, in a fearful commotion which threatens to shake the foundations of our Union. It is time to pause in our career to review our principles, and if possible revive that devoted patriotism and spirit of compromise which distinguished the sages of the Revolution and the fathers of our Union. If we can not at once, in justice to interests vested under improvident legislation, make our Government what it ought to be, we can at least take a stand against all new grants of monopolies and exclusive privileges, against any prostitution of our Government to the advancement of the few at the expense of the many, and in favor of compromise and gradual reform in our code of laws and system of political economy….