6.  To transmit personal chattels to successors in a certain line; and so far, is against the laws of Distribution.

7.  To give them the sole and exclusive right of banking under the national authority; and so far, is against the laws of Monopoly.

8.  To communicate to them a power to make laws paramount to the laws of the States; for so they must be construed, to protect the institution from the control of the State legislatures; and so, probably, they will be construed.

I consider the foundation of the constitution as laid on this ground, that all powers not delegated to the United States by the constitution nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people.’ (Twelfth amendment.) To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.

The incorporation of a bank, and the powers assumed by this bill, have not, in my opinion, been delegated to the United States by the constitution.

I. They are not among the powers specially, enumerated.  For these are,

1.  A power to lay taxes for the purpose of paying the debts of the United States.  But no debt is paid by this bill, nor any tax laid.  Were it a bill to raise money, its origination in the Senate would condemn it by the constitution.

2.  To ‘borrow money.’  But this bill neither borrows money, nor insures the borrowing it.  The proprietors of the bank will be just as free as any other money-holders, to lend or not to lend their money to the public.  The operation proposed in the bill, first to lend them two millions, and then borrow them back again cannot change the nature of the latter act, which will still be a payment and not a loan, call it by what name you please.

3.  ’To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the States, and with the Indian tribes.’  To erect a bank, and to regulate commerce, are very different acts.  He who erects a bank creates a subject of commerce in its bills:  so does he who makes a bushel of wheat, or digs a dollar out of the mines.  Yet neither of these persons regulates commerce thereby.  To make a thing which may be bought and sold, is not to prescribe regulations for buying and selling.  Besides, if this were an exercise of the power of regulating commerce, it would be void, as extending as much to the internal commerce of every State, as to its external.  For the power given to Congress by the constitution, does not extend to the internal regulation, of the commerce of a State (that is to say, of the commerce between citizen and citizen), which remains exclusively with its own legislature; but to its external commerce only, that is to say, its commerce with another State, or with foreign nations, or with the Indian tribes.  Accordingly, the bill does not propose the measure as a ‘regulation of trade,’ but as ’productive of considerable advantage to trade.’