The Bank, meantime, disappears from sight and keeps silence; it continues to attend to its own business, and prudently confines itself to that alone. Its best policy is to avoid as much as possible making itself the subject of common talk. The demagogues have raised such a cry of monopoly and aristocracy, that the people have come to believe the Bank a colossus of aristocracy, a prop of monopoly. These words _monopoly_ and _aristocracy_ are here, what the word _Jesuits_ was in France a few years ago; if the enemies of any institution can write on its back this kind of _abracadabra_, it is pointed at, hooted at, and hissed at by the multitude. Such is the magic power of these words, that speculators employ them on all occasions as charms to draw customers. For example, at the head of the advertisements of steamboats you read in staring characters: NO MONOPOLY!!! It is pitiful to say that the Bank of the United States has a monopoly, when there are no less than five hundred other banks in the country; by this course of reasoning one might convict the sun of enjoying a monopoly of light. And yet the multitude has believed it, and believes it still. Now the best policy for those against whom such a storm of unpopularity is raised, is to run for port, as the sailors do in a gale of wind. The Bank has twice attempted to strike a blow, by taking advantage of the mistakes of its enemies, and both times the stroke has recoiled on itself.
The first time, the subject of dispute was a draft on the French government, which was sold to the Bank last year by the Federal government, and which France refused to pay; the draft was, therefore, protested, and then paid by the correspondent of the Bank in Paris in honour of the endorser. In this affair the Executive of the United States committed two faults: 1. It was an act of indiscretion to draw on the French government, before the Chambers had made the necessary appropriation for paying the stipulated indemnity; 2. Instead of drawing on the French government by a bill of exchange, and selling the bill to the Bank, without knowing whether it would be accepted, the Executive would have conducted itself with more propriety towards France, towards the Bank, and towards itself, if it had authorized the Bank to receive the moneys paid by the French government, in the capacity of its agent or attorney. By the commercial practice of all countries, and of this in particular, the Bank had a right to damages, and it put in its claim. Its object in taking this step, was much more to expose the errors of the Executive, than to pocket the sum of 50,000 or 80,000 dollars. But its adversaries immediately raised the cry, that the Bank was not contented with exacting enormous sums from the sweat of the people to the profit of the stockholders, (observe that the dividends of the Bank are moderate, compared with those of other banking companies in the country, and that the Federal government is itself the largest share-holder); but that it was now attempting, by petty chicanery, to extort a portion of the public revenue, and to bury the _people's money in Biddle's pockets_. To this reasoning, and it passes for demonstration, the multitude answered by imprecations against monopoly and the moneyed aristocracy, and by renewed shouts of HURRAH FOR JACKSON!