over a veto, a "Relief Act." The object was to secure a loan of three millions from the banks. The Act allowed them to issue that amount in small notes which they were to subscribe to a five per cent loan. They were to redeem the notes in five per cent stock on demand in amounts over one hundred dollars. The stocks were then at eighty and specie at seven per cent premium.
The best financial writer in the country at that time (Gouge) said of this Act: Pennsylvania, "after having borrowed as much as she could in the old-fashioned way from banks and brokers, and domestic and foreign capitalists, resolved to extort a loan of a dollar a head from every washerwoman and woodsawyer and everybody else within her limits who had a dollar to lend. But as washerwomen and woodsawyers and other dollar people cannot long dispense with the use of their funds, it was necessary to give these certificates of loan in a circulating form, so that the burden might be shifted from one to another day by day, or, if necessary, two or three times a day."
The summer of 1841 was marked by intense distress in Pennsylvania. A table of the best investment stocks of Philadelphia shows a shrinkage between August, 1838, and August, 1841, from sixty million to three and one-half millions. The wages class was exposed to the bitterest poverty and distress. The Pennsylvanians attributed the trouble to the want of a protective tariff. For a time, in the autumn, the Relief notes seemed to act beneficially. The banks took them and they circulated at par with the rest of the state currency. In January, 1842, the Girard Bank failed, and about the same time the Pennsylvania and three others less important, and by March a crisis was reached worse than anything which had preceded. A bill was suddenly passed by the legislature commanding immediate resumption. An amendment was proposed that the banks should no longer be bound to receive the Relief
