Page:A History of Banking in the United States.djvu/33

 March 30, 1742: "A Committee for the settlement of the Land Bank publish a pressing call on its stockholders to settle its demands upon them. This call contains the succeeding items." "It is now nine months since the company's vote at Lynn that no more bills should be issued out of the Treasury till the next meeting, and more than six months since the vote passed at Milton to bring in and consume to ashes all the outstanding bills. By the delay of those indebted to the institution, our company is thrown into the last extremity of confusion; and without the most speedy measures are pursued in bringing in the bills, the consequence will, we fear, prove ruinous to some hundreds of the partners. The possessors of our bills are more and more uneasy every day as that part of their estates lies useless by them, and so incessant in their worries, that the directors have in their late advertisement implicitly threatened to be on the possessors' side against the delaying partners."

This bank is heard of again and again during the following twenty years. The surviving or solvent stockholders and their heirs were subject to repeated demands from the noteholders, which they seem to have evaded to the best of their ability.

There is a tradition that there was a bank in Virginia before the establishment of the Bank of North America. A special loan office was proposed there in 1765, to enable the Treasurer of the colony to make good public funds which he had loaned to his friends, but it failed. The tradition may more probably be based upon an Association referred to in an act of 1777: "Whereas divers persons have presumed upon their own private security to issue bills of credit or notes payable to the bearer in the nature of paper currency," a penalty is imposed upon those who "issue or offer in payment" any such notes without the authorization of the Commonwealth, of ten times the amount of the note, half to go the informer.