‘Suppose the constitution had been silent as to an individual department of the government, could you, under the power to lay and collect taxes, establish a judiciary? I presume not; but if you could derive the power by mere implication, could you vest it with any other authority than to enforce the collection of the revenue? A bank is made for the ostensible purpose of aiding in the collection of the revenue, and whilst it is engaged in this, the most inferior and subordinate of all its functions, it is made to diffuse itself throughout society, and to influence all the great operations of credit, circulation, and commerce. Like the Virginia justice, you tell the man whose turkey had been stolen, that your books of precedents furnish no form for his case, but then you will grant him a precept to search for a cow, and when looking for that he may possibly find his turkey! You say to this corporation, we cannot authorize you to discount――to emit paper――to regulate commerce――no! our book has no precedents of that kind. But then we can authorize you to collect the revenue, and whilst occupied with that, you may do whatever else you please.
‘What is a corporation, such as the bill contemplates? It is a splendid association of favored individuals, taken from the mass of society, and invested with exemptions, and surrounded by immunities and privileges. The honorable gentleman from Massachusetts has said that the original law establishing the bank was justly liable to the objection of vesting in that institution an exclusive privilege,――the faith of the government being pledged that no other bank should be authorized during its existence. This objection, he supposes, is obviated by the bill under consideration; but all corporations enjoy exclusive privileges――that is, the corporators have privileges which no others possess; if you create fifty corporations instead of one, you have only fifty privileged bodies instead of one. I contend that the states have the exclusive power to regulate contracts, to declare the capacities and incapacities to contract, and to provide as to the extent of the responsibility of debtors to their creditors. If congress have the power to create an artificial body and say it shall be endowed with the attributes of an individual, if you can bestow on this object of your own creation the ability to contract, may you not in contravention of state rights confer upon slaves, infants, and _femes covert_, the ability to contract? And if you have the power to say that an association of individuals shall be responsible for their debts only in a certain limited degree, what is to prevent an extension of a similar exemption to individuals? Where is the limitation upon this power to set up corporations? You establish one in the heart of a state, the basis of whose capital is money. You may erect others, whose capital shall consist of land, slaves, and personal estate, and thus the whole property within the jurisdiction of a state might be absorbed by those political bodies. The existing bank contends that it is beyond the power of a state to tax it, and if this pretension be well founded, it is in the power of congress by chartering companies to dry up all the sources of state revenue. This government has the power to lay taxes, to raise armies, provide munitions, make war, regulate commerce, coin money, etc., etc. It would not be difficult to show as intimate a connection between a corporation established for any purpose whatever, and some one or other of those great powers, as there is between the revenue and the bank of the United States.’