To such a community [the American body politic]--in an appeal on a great question of constitutional law to the understandings of such a people--declamation, passion, epithets, opprobrious language, will stand for nothing. They will float harmless and unheeded through the empty air, and strike in vain upon the ear of a sober and dispassionate tribunal. Indignation, real or affected; wrath, however hot; fury, however enraged; asseverations, however violent; denunciation, however furious, will avail nothing. Facts, inexorable facts, are all that will be attended to; reason, calm and self-possessed, is all that will be listened to.
The description of the mass of Jacksonian voters as forming "a sober and dispassionate tribunal" is an artistic touch of fancy quite unique, but admirably characteristic of Benton, whose statements always rose vigorously to the necessities of the occasion.
Webster, in an effort to make the best of untoward circumstances, brought in a bill to re-charter the Bank for a short period, at the same time doing away with some of the features that were objectionable in the old charter. This bill might have passed, had it not been opposed by the extreme Bank men, including Clay and Calhoun. In the course of the debate over it Benton delivered a very elaborate and carefully studied speech in favor of hard money and a currency of the precious metals; a speech which is to this day well worth careful reading. Some of his financial theories were crude and confused; but on the main question he was perfectly sound. Both he and Jackson deserve great credit for having done much to impress the popular mind with the benefit of hard, that is to say honest, money. Benton was the strongest hard-money man then in public life, being, indeed, popularly nicknamed "Old Bullion." He thoroughly appreciated that a metallic currency was of more vital importance to the laboring men and to men of small capital generally than to any of the richer classes. A metallic currency is always surer and safer than a paper currency; where it exists a laboring man dependent on his wages need fear less than any other member of the community the evils of bad banking. Benton's idea of the danger to the masses from "the money power" was exaggerated; but in advocating a sound gold currency he took the surest way to overcome any possible dangerous tendency. A craze for "soft," or dishonest, money--a greenback movement, or one for short weight silver dollars--works more to the disadvantage of the whole mass of the people than even to that of the capitalists; it is a move directly in the interests of "the money power," which its loud-mouthed advocates are ostensibly opposing in the interests of democracy.