718. BANKS, Jefferson's disapprobation of Paper.—[further continued].
I do not know whether
you may recollect how loudly my voice was
raised against the establishment of banks in
the beginning; but like that of Cassandra it
was not listened to. I was set down as a
madman by those who have since been victims
to them. I little thought then how much
I was to suffer by them myself; for I, too, am
taken in by endorsements for a friend to the
amount of $20,000, for the payment of which
I shall have to make sale of that much of my
property. And yet the general revolution of
fortunes, which these instruments have produced,
seems not at all to have cured our
country of this mania.—
To Thomas Leiper.
Ford ed., x, 254.
(May. 1823)
