Had every particular banking company always understood and attended to its own particular interest, the circulation never could have been overstocked with paper money.
But every particular banking company has not always understood or attended to its own particular interest, and the circulation has frequently been overstocked with paper money.
In these different operations, its duty to the public may sometimes have obliged it, without any fault of its directors, to overstock the circulation with paper money.
By the one institution, they secured to themselves the monopoly of the home market, and by the other they endeavoured to prevent that market from ever being overstocked with their commodity.
That market will very seldom be overstocked; but it will generally be understocked; the people, whose business it is to supply it, being generally afraid lest their goods should be left upon their hands.
But it is not the interest of merchants and manufacturers, the great inventors of all these expedients, that the home market should be overstocked with their goods; an event which a bounty upon production might sometimes occasion.
The market would be so much understocked with labour in the one case, and so much overstocked in the other, as would soon force back its price to that proper rate which the circumstances of the society required.