Excerpt from Speech of Mr. Bell, of Tennessee, on the Message of the President of the United States: Delivered in the House of Representatives, December 26, 1838

I mean concentrated power - associated official power. I mean (to speak practically) the concentration of power in the executive branch of the Government of the United States. It is worthy of serious notice that in a paper emanating, as this does, from the President himself, and which professes to set forth to a free people the most prominent dangers which threaten their liberties, and to awaken their vigilance against those evil tendencies which lurk in the system, the one which has always proved the most fatal - the tendency of power to accumulate in the hands of one man, and the grasping and monopolizing tendency of that power - is altogether omitted. Why is this? Why not admonish the people, when speaking of the tendencies of wealth in banks or elsewhere, that there was another most formidable danger in this and in every other free Government, which united all the evils of mere wealth with the more fearful passion of ambition? I affirm, then, sir, that this enumeration of the perils to which our free institutions are exposed is not perfect.

If, said Mr. B., this warning given to the people in relation to the "anti-republican tendency of associated wealth" is only intended to be a continuation of the attacks heretofore made with so much acrimony upon the banking institutions of the country, I will not undertake to answer it in my own language, or by any arguments of my own, for I have never felt disposed to become the champion of those institutions, but in the language and by the arguments of a man of far more weight and influence, both from the station which he fills, and the large share of respect and influence he has always enjoyed with the party in power - a man whose late political career was directly connected with the most extraordinary incidents of the late administration - a man who owes his present elevation to the hearty approval with which his party sustained him in the most questionable act of that administration, a man whose opinions upon the question now under review were then received as orthodox and incontrovertible. I allude to the Chief Justice of the United States, (Mr. Taney.)

[Mr. B. read from a letter of Mr. Taney, while Secretary of the Treasury, to the Committee of Ways and Means, of the 13th of April, 1834, a few paragraphs strongly commendatory of the State banks, and asserting in very broad terms the indispensable agency in a country like ours of banks and a paper circulation founded on credit.]

But, Mr. Chairman, if I correctly understand the import of the passage now under consideration, it manifests a laxity of principle, a recklessness of consequences, such a spirit of desperation in the choice of means to sustain power as ought to receive the severest reprehension from every well-wisher to our free institutions. This covert denunciation of wealth and of the rich is, without doubt, intended to be understood by those whom it pleases as a proof that the author of it is a friend and champion of the poor, as distinguished from the rich. Viewing it in this light, it is a sort of argument - an electioneering cant, which, however shameful and indefensible, may be allowed in the public speeches of ordinary candidates for a seat in the Legislature, or for some office or station in a State, or even for a seat in this Hall of the Representatives of the nation, but in a Chief Magistrate it is wholly unworthy and detestable.

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