Page:A History of Banking in the United States.djvu/161

 renewal was neglected for sixty days, suit was to be brought. Semi-annual reports by the branches to the head office were to be required. All debts were to be called in, so as to be paid by June 1, 1834. No renewal was to be made without security, and no new loans were to be made under any pretense whatever. Salaries were to be paid in Commonwealth notes. All receivers for the Bank were to pay to it the same paper which they received, or other of equal value. In that year, several branches of the Bank of the Commonwealth were broken open and notes were stolen. January 15, 1831, the agents of the Bank of the Commonwealth were to take oath that they were complying with the requirement to pay to the bank the currency received by them.

In 1831, a new Commonwealth Bank was projected. A later generation of debtors did not see why the State should not repeat on their behalf what it had done for those of 1820.

In 1833, and again in 1837, the bank was required to credit the Treasurer with the amount which he owed to it, and in the last year it was enacted that "the said bank shall hereafter redeem all its notes in specie, as well when presented by the Treasury as other persons."

The counsel for the bank, in Briscoe's case, declared that there were not over $40,000 of its notes outstanding, and that perhaps that amount had been lost. In 1834, an official report showed $56,843 outstanding, and notes of the Bank of Kentucky to the amount of $31,081. The former were quoted at Philadelphia in 1830 at thirty-five discount; the latter at twenty-five discount. In 1835, the corresponding quotations were Commonwealth, sixteen discount; Bank of Kentucky, thirteen discount. The sales of land, at this time, had absorbed them to such an extent as to raise their value.

This means, as the net final result of this financial device, that the State had given to the debtors of 1820 its lands with which to pay their debts; or, more strictly, that it had tried to do so, and, in the attempt, had lost its lands to such persons as were in a position to take advantage of the opportunities offered them, during the fifteen years in which the process was going on, to win gain from it. It is not impossible that here and there a debtor who was extraordinarily shrewd and hard-headed may have availed himself of the relief system successfully, but the number of such must have been very small. In all the cases of relief attempted by big paper money machines the advantage was won by influential individuals who got the management of the undertaking into their hands and turned it to their own profit.

It may be said, almost without limitation, that all paper money issues and stay laws for the relief of debtors have had, as their sole result, to curse debtors with life-long poverty, misery, and debt; and further, that, in the history of this country, "relief" has been the word of the most direful omen to those-who-have-not that the dictionary contains.