GREAT USEFULNESS OF THE BANK—SURPRISING GROWTH OF QUODLIBET—SOME ACCOUNT OF THE HON. MIDDLETON FLAM—ORIGIN OF HIS DEMOCRACY—HIS LOGICAL ARGUMENT IN FAVOR OF THE POCKETING OF THE BILL TO REPEAL THE SPECIE CIRCULAR—THE DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLE AS DEVELOPED IN THE REPRESENTATIVE SYSTEM.

In the course of the first year after The Removal, or as I should say, in the year One—speaking after our manner in Quodlibet—the bank made itself very agreeable to everybody. Mr. Flam came home from Congress after the end of the long session, and found everything prospering beyond his most sanguine expectations. Nicodemus Handy had put a new weather-boarded room to the back of his office for the use of the Directors, and the banking business was transacted in the front apartment where Nicodemus used to sell lottery tickets. There was one thing that strangers visiting Quodlibet were accustomed to remark upon in a jocular vein, regarding the bank—and that was the sign which was placed, as it were parapet-wise, along the eaves of the roof, and being of greater longitude than the front of the building, projected considerably at either end. Quipes has been held responsible for this, but I know that he could not help it, on account of the length of the name, which, nevertheless, it is due to him to say he endeavored, very much to my discontent, to shorten, both by orthographical device and by abbreviation, having painted it thus—

notwithstanding which, it overran the dimensions of the tenement to which it was attached. I say strangers sometimes facetiously alluded to this discrepancy, by observing that the bank was like the old Hero himself, too great for the frame that contained it. And, truly, the bank did a great business! Mr. Handy, who is acknowledged to be a man of taste, procured one of the handsomest plates, it is supposed, that Murray, Draper & Fairman ever executed, and with about six bales of pinkish silk paper, and a very superior cylinder press, created an amount of capital which soon put to rest old Mr. Grant's grumbling about the want of solidity in the bank, and fully justified the Secretary's declaration of his confidence in its "established character as affording a sufficient guarantee for the safety of the public money intrusted to its keeping."

As a proof how admirably matters were conducted by Mr. Handy, the Directors soon found no other reason to attend at the Board than now and then to hold a chat upon politics and smoke a cigar; and the President, the Hon. Middleton Flam, having his October election on hand, was so thoroughly convinced of Nicodemus's ability, that I do not believe he went into the bank more than half a dozen times during the whole season.

It was in the course of this year, and pretty soon after the bank got the deposits, that Mr. Handy began his row of four story brick warehouses on the Basin, which now goes by the name of Nicodemus Row. He also laid the foundation of his mansion on the hill, fronting upon Handy Place; and which edifice he subsequently finished, so much to the adornment of our Borough, with a Grecian portico in front, and an Italian veranda looking toward the garden. As his improvements advanced in this and the next year, he successively reared a Temple of Minerva on the top of the ice-house, a statue of Apollo in the center of the carriage-circle, a sun-dial on a marble pillar where the garden walks intersect, and a gilded dragon weather-cock on the cupola of the stables. The new banking house was commenced early in the summer, and has been finished of very beautiful granite, being in its front, if I am rightly informed by Mr. Handy, an exact miniature copy of the Tomb of Osymandias: it is situated on Flam Street, the first after you leave the Basin, going northward. All the Directors, except Fog, followed the footsteps of their illustrious predecessor, Mr. Handy, and went to work to build themselves villas on the elevated ground back of the Borough, now known by the name of Copperplate Ridge,—which villas were duly completed in all manner of Greek, Roman, and Tuscan fashions. These being likewise imitated, in turn, by many friends of the bank who migrated hither from all parts and cast their lines in our Borough, Quodlibet hath thereby, very suddenly, grown to be, in a figurative sense, a pattern card of the daintiest structures of the four quarters of the world. Perhaps I may be too fast in making so broad an assertion—cupio non putari mendacem—I am not quite sure that, as yet, we have any well ascertained specimen of the Asiatic: but if Nicodemus Handy's pagoda, which he talked of building on the knoll in the center of his training course, had not been interrupted by an untoward event, of which it may become my duty to speak hereafter, I should, in that case, have made no difficulty in reiterating, with a clear conscience and without reservation, the remark which distrustfully and with claim of allowance I have ventured above.

My valuable patron not being resident actually within the Borough, and being, as I have said, very busy in the matter of his election during the greater part of the first year of the bank, had not much opportunity to devote himself to its concerns. But the Directors, partly aware of their own knowledge, how valuable was his influence with the Secretary, and partly persuaded thereof by the Cashier, established, with a liberality which Mr. Handy remarked at the time was exceedingly gentlemanlike, his salary as President at three thousand dollars a year—which sum, Mr. Flam himself has, more than once in my hearing, averred upon his honor, he did not consider one cent too much. And indeed, I feel myself bound to express my concurrence in this opinion, when I reflect upon the weight of his character, the antiquity of his family, the preponderance of his strong Democratic sentiments, and the expenses to which, as President, he was exposed in looking after the interests of the bank—more especially in the journeys to Washington, whereof I have heard him speak, for the purpose of explaining matters to the Secretary.

Connected with this matter of salary, and as having a natural propinquity to the subject, I may here cursorily, for I design to be more particular on this point hereafter, claim the privilege to enter a little into the family matters of my patron. And on this head, I would observe that the household of Mr. Flam is large. Of a truth, as some philosopher has remarked, mouths are not fed, nor bodies clad, without considerable of the wherewithal! There is Mrs. Flam, the venerated consort of our representative—a lady most honorably conducive to the multiplication of the strength and glory of this land; there is, likewise, Mr. Flam's sister Janet—truly an honor to her sex for instructive discourse and exemplary life; and there is Master Middleton, Junior, with his four sisters and three brothers, who may be all ranged into the semblance of a step-ladder. Great is Mr. Flam's parental tenderness toward this happy progeny—the reduplication and retriplication, if I may so express it, of himself and their respectable mamma. Yielding to the solicitude inspired by this tenderness, almost the first thing which our representative did, after the establishment of the bank—the means having thereby come the better to his hand—was to send Master Middleton, Junior, who was very urgent in his entreaties to that point, to Europe, that the young gentleman, by two or three years travel, might witness the distresses and oppressions of monarchical government, and become confirmed in his democratic sentiments. A refinement of sensibility in Mr. Flam, which I might almost denominate fastidious, has also operated with him to require the education of his daughters to be conducted under his own roof. He would never hear, for one moment, any persuasion to trust them, even at their earliest age, in the public school—considerately fearful lest they might form intimacies unbecoming the station to which he destined them in after-life. They have consequently been placed under the special tuition of a most estimable lady, Mademoiselle Jonquille, a resident governess, who is enjoined to speak to them nothing but French. This lady, among other things, teaches them music, and is aided in the arduous duties allotted to her by a drawing-master of acknowledged ability in water-colors, and a very superior professor of dancing, who instructs them in the elegant accomplishment of waltzing and galloping, which, Mr. Flam says, is now-a-days held to be indispensable in the first Democratic circles at Washington, where it has always been his design to introduce the young ladies into high life.

It will not be out of place here to mention that the worthy subject of this desultory memoir, my patron and former pupil, inherited a large fortune from his father, the late Judge Flam, who was especially honored by old John Adams, or, as the better phrase is, the elder Adams, with an appointment to the bench on the night of the third of March, Anno Domini 1801; and I have often heard Mr. Middleton say that his father had, up to the day of his lamented departure from this world, which melancholy event happened in the year of our Lord 1825, the greatest respect for General Jackson; which liking for the Old Hero descended to his son, along with the family estate, and serves satisfactorily to account for my former pupil's ardent attachment to Democratic principles, as in the sequel I shall make appear.

I do not desire to conceal the fact that Judge Flam, and even Mr. Middleton himself, for some years after he came to man's estate, were both reputed to belong to what was generally, at that time, denominated and known by the appellation of the Old Federal party, and what, in common parlance, has been sometimes scoffingly termed The Black Cockade; and that the Judge, who was always noted for being very stiff in his opinions, maintained his connection nominally with that party until the day of his death. I mention this not in derogation of Mr. Middleton our representative, but rather in the way of commendation, because I am by this fact the more strongly confirmed in my admiration of the greatness of his character—seeing that his conversion to Democracy is the pure result of reflection and conviction, which is more laudable, in my humble thinking, than to be "a born veteran Democrat," as I once heard a great man boast himself.

Now this conversion being a notable matter, I can by no means pretermit a veritable account of it, which happens to be fully within my power to disclose, I being, as I may say, a witness to the whole course of it.

Everybody remembers that most signal of all the literary productions of General Jackson's various and illustrious pen, his letter to Mr. Monroe, dated the 12th of November, Anno Domini 1816. It came—in the language of my venerated friend, Judge Flam—like the sound of a trumpet upon the ears of all of the Old Federalists. "Now is the time," says General Jackson, in that immortal letter, which I transcribed, as soon as I saw it in print, into my book of memorable things, and which I now quote verbatim et literatim:—

This letter of the last of the Romans was published in the National Intelligencer, and I happened to be with Judge Flam when it first met his eye. He was sipping his tea. The venerable Judge read it twice; took up the cup, and, in a musing, thoughtful mood, burnt his mouth with the hot liquid so badly that he was obliged to call for cold water.—Just at that moment, Middleton, his son, came into the parlor: he had been out shooting partridges.

"My dear Middleton, read that," said the Judge.

Middleton sat down and read it; and then looked intently at his father, waiting to hear what he would say.

"Middleton, my son," said he in a very deliberate and emphatic manner, "There's our man. General Jackson has been called a Hero—he's a Sage, a wise man, a very wise man. We have been kept in the mire too long: these Jeffersons and Madisons, and Nicholases and Randolphs, and all that Virginia Junto (I think that was the very word he used) have trodden us in the dust. They, with all the Democracy at their back, have lorded it over us for sixteen years. We owe them an old grudge. But our time is coming, (this expression he repeated twice.) Remember, my son, if ever you get into a majority, stick to it. Bring up your children to it. You have a long account to settle:—I shall bequeath to you the Vengeance of the Federal party. We must rally at once upon Andrew Jackson. He will bring us what it is fashionable to call 'the people.'—We shall bring him the talent, the intelligence, and the patriotism of the land. In such an alliance how can it be otherwise but that we shall have all the power?—and then, if we fail to play our cards with skill, we shall deserve to lose the game. Let Jackson be our candidate for the next Presidency, and let our gathering word be, in the sentiment of this memorable letter, 'The Union of the People and the extermination of the Monster of Party.' Do not slumber, my son, but give your energies to this great enterprise."

Mr. Middleton took this advice of his venerable father greatly to heart. "Up with Jackson, and down with Party!" said he, after a long rumination; "good, excellent—nothing can be better!" And several times that night, before he went to bed, he audibly uttered the same words, as he walked backward and forward across the room.

From this time Judge Flam wrote many letters to his friends, disclosing the views he had expressed to Middleton; and by degrees the matter ripened and ripened, until things were so contrived as to bring about what Judge Flam used to smile and say, was "a spontaneous, unpremeditated burst of popular feeling," in the nomination of the General. And the Judge used to laugh outright, when the papers took strong ground in the General's favor, as the candidate who was brought out "without intrigue or party management." The Old Hero and Sage, we all know, was cheated out of his first election; which circumstance greatly embittered his early friends, who, from that time—Mr. Middleton among the rest—took a very decided stand for Reform, Retrenchment, Economy, and the Rights of the People.

The Judge did not live to witness this second effort which resulted so gloriously for the Democratic cause; but his son stuck close to the Old Hero, and was among his most ardent supporters to the last. When the General succeeded, his first care was to show his gratitude to that disinterested band of patriots who so freely surrendered their old principles and abandoned their old comrades in his behalf. He brought them into office, just to show that he was determined to carry out the doctrine of his letter; and they were loudest in their praise of him for the sake of the old grudge, of which Judge Flam spoke to his son, and to indemnify their long suffering in the cause of the country, in the course of which they had, for so many years, been strangers to power. So between these two persuasions, it is not to be wondered at that they should have become the principal friends and most confidential advisers of the General.

Having thus got upon an elevation, from whence they could look backward upon their past errors, and forward to their future hopes, a new light dawned upon every man of them; and thereupon they straightway became sick and sorry for having so long sinned against Democracy, and grew ashamed of that black cockade which George Washington wore in the Revolution; made open renunciation of their former pretended attachment to his principles; canonized Mr. Jefferson as a saint, whom they had formerly reviled as the chief of sinners; purged out their old Federal blood; took deep alterative draughts of detergent medicine; and, finally, like true patriots, came forth regenerated, thorough-bred whole-hog Democrats, sworn to follow the new Democratic principle through all its meanderings, traverses, dodgings, and duckings to the end. Indeed, Mr. Middleton Flam, our honorable representative, has more than once, in some of his later speeches before the people, contended, that although his father was attached to George Washington's school of politics, which, as he remarked, naturally arose out of the prejudices created by the revolutionary war—in which the old Judge had served as a soldier—yet, that he, Middleton, never was truly an admirer of that gentleman's theory of government or system of measures—but, on the contrary, held them in marked disesteem, and from his earliest youth had a strong inclination toward that freedom from restraint, which, in man and boy, is the best test of the new Democratic principle. In proof of this tendency of his youthful opinions, he mentioned, with most admirable effect, an exploit, in which, when not more than twelve years of age, he gallantly stood up at the head of a party of his school-fellows to bar out the tutor and take a holiday, on the ground of the indefeasible rights of man, with a view to attend a great political meeting of the friends of Jefferson, just previous to the second election of that Apostle of Democracy.

Be that as it may, our distinguished member of Congress is now, by force of reflection and conviction, as pure, unadulterated, and, as our people jocularly denote it, as patent a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat as Theodore Fog himself, whose attachment to popular principles, habits, and manners, and whose unalterable adhesion to the new Democratic theory, are written in every line of his face and in every movement of his body:—and so, Mr. Flam avers, is every one of his black-cockade friends who have got an office. "Thus it is,"—if I may be allowed to quote a beautiful sentiment from one of Fog's speeches—"thus it is, that by degrees, the errors of old opinions are washed out by the all-pervading ablution of the Democratic principle following in the footsteps of the march of intellect; and so true is it, that the body politic, like quicksilver, regurgitates and repudiates the feculence of Federalism."

Nicodemus Handy has an attachment for Mr. Flam, which is truly fraternal. It goes so far as to prevent him from ever contradicting Mr. Middleton in any fact, or gainsaying him in any opinion—although I did think at one time, when Nicodemus was thought to be rich, that he was a little bold in his sentiments on two or three matters wherein our member differed from him. One I remember in particular; it was when the Old Hero pocketed the Specie Circular Bill. Mr. Handy thought, for a little while, that the circular was too hard upon the banks and the trading people, and he seemed to insinuate that the General was rather cornered by Congress, when they ordered its repeal by two-thirds of both Houses; and that, consequently, as a good Democrat, he ought to have submitted to the will of the people in that matter, and allowed them to have the law after it was passed. Mr. Flam was diametrically opposed to him, and proved, I thought conclusively, that, according to the sound Quodlibetarian Democratic principle, the General was altogether right in putting the act of Congress aside and not allowing them to overset his plans by another vote of two-thirds. "For," he inquired with great force of argument, adopting the Socratic form, "what is Congress? The representatives of the people, by districts and by States. For whom can any one man in that body speak? For his own district, or for his own State—no more. Now, what is the President? Sir," said he, in that solemn and impressive tone in which he addresses the House at Washington, "the President himself has answered that question in his immortal Protest against the Senate—he is 'the direct representative of the American people,' and, as he took occasion once to say in his Message, 'It will be for those in whose behalf we all act, to decide whether the Executive Department of the Government, in the steps which it has taken on this subject, has been found in the line of its duty.' The President, sir, is the representative of the whole people—not of a district, not of a State, but of the whole nation. Why should these representatives of the parts undertake to dictate to the representative of the whole? It is for the people to decide whether, in putting that bill in his pocket, he was in the line of his duty. Sir, there is the broad buttress upon which the Democratic principle reposes, and will repose forever. Jackson has determined, as representative of the people, that the Specie Circular shall not be repealed, and every true Democrat will of course say that he is right. I am surprised that you, Handy, should give any countenance to the factious doctrine set up by the Whigs, that Congress has a right to array itself against the clearly expressed will of the people, when uttered through the paramount representative of the whole nation."

Mr. Handy was evidently confounded by this unanswerable argument, and, of course, did not attempt to answer. I confess, for my own part, I listened with admiration and amazement at the dialectic skill with which so abstruse a subject was so briefly yet so clearly elucidated, and I inwardly ejaculated, in the language of the afflicted man of Uz, "How forcible are right words!"

My late pupil's reflections were drawn to this question of the Specie Circular with more intensity of regard, from a very natural train of circumstances, which had great influence in inducing an elaborate study of the subject. Mr. Handy has often said that Mr. Flam was the very best customer our bank had from the beginning. Acting, as he always did, upon the principle that our first care is due to those who are nearest to us, or, according to the adage, that charity begins at home, the President of the bank refused to borrow from any other institution, but determined exclusively to patronize his own. This principle he carried to the romantic extent of borrowing four times as much as anybody else; and as he always contended for it as the most approved theorem in banking, that the wider and the more remote the circulation of the paper of a bank, the better for its profit, he employed these funds in the purchase of a large quantity of the Chickasaw Reserve lands. By these means Mr. Flam became the proprietor of a vast number of acres in that Southwest country; and as the Specie Circular was a most laudable contrivance to stop overtrading and speculating in the public lands, it occurred to our worthy representative that the less the public lands were sold, the more his would come into the market at good prices; and so, with a view to the benefit of Quodlibet, where he expected to invest the profits, he became a strong advocate of the Circular. This set him to studying the question of the pocketing of the bill for its repeal, whereof I have spoken above, and enabled him to convince himself how deeply that matter was connected with the development of the Democratic principle in the manner put forth in his argument to Mr. Handy.

Thus does it come to pass that, step by step, as our government rolls on, its fundamental features are successively disclosed in the practical operations of that sublime system which so securely intrenches the good of the people in the doctrines of genuine Quodlibetarian Democracy, as now of late, for the first time, fully understood and practiced.

Ever after that notable discourse, Mr. Handy showed himself, both in private and at our public meetings, the stern, uncompromising champion of the Specie Circular and of the broad representative character of the President. The other questions upon which I have found him to differ occasionally with Mr. Flam, shared pretty nearly the same fate as this. The Cashier ultimately fell into entire harmony of sentiment in all matters with the President; though, as I have insinuated before, in the flood-tide of Mr. Handy's fortune, when he began to be accounted a man of wealth, he was, in accordance with a principle of human nature founded upon the corrupting and debasing influence of riches, much more difficult to bring into perfect conformity of opinion with Mr. Flam, than in the ebb. Yet, I would here remark that, almost in the same degree that Mr. Handy yielded his assent to the doctrines of the Hon. Middleton Flam, did the rank and file of our sturdy and independent Democracy yield to Mr. Handy; the whole party being kept in a harmonious agreement and accord by what Fog terms "the electric diffusion of the Democratic principle through the whole circle of hand-in-hand, unflinching, unwavering, uncorruptible, and power-frowning-down yeomanry of the most virtuous and enlightened nation upon the terrestrial globe."