184 POLITICAL LIFE- IX 



possible, there was an immense gain to every man, woman, 

 and child in the country. 



To appreciate this gain one must have had experience 

 of the older system. I remember well the panic of 1857, 

 which arose while I was traveling in eastern and northern 

 New England, and that, arriving in the city of Salem, 

 Massachusetts, having tendered, in payment of my hotel 

 bill, notes issued by a leading New York city bank, guar 

 anteed under what was known as the Safety Fund Sys 

 tem,&quot; they were refused. The result was that I had to 

 leave my wife at the hotel, go to Boston, and there manage 

 to get Massachusetts money. 



But this was far short of the worst. Professor Boberts 

 of Cornell University once told me that, having in those 

 days collected a considerable debt in one of the Western 

 States, he found the currency so worthless that he at 

 tempted to secure New York funds, but that the rate of 

 exchange was so enormous that, as the only way of saving 

 anything, he bojij^J^Jto^ej^^ 

 shipped it to the East, and sold it for what it would bring. 



As to the way in which the older banking operations 

 were carried on in some of the Western States, Gov 

 ernor Felch of Michigan once gave me some of his ex 

 periences as a bank examiner, and one of them especially 

 amused me. He said that he and a brother examiner made 

 an excursion through the State in a sleigh with a pair of 

 good horses in order to inspect the various banks estab 

 lished in remote villages and hamlets which had the power 

 of issuing currency based upon the specie contained in 

 their vaults. After visiting a few of these, and finding 

 that each had the amount of specie required by law, the 

 examiners began to note a curious similarity between the 

 specie packages in these different banks, and before long 

 their attention was drawn to another curious fact, which 

 was that wherever they went they were preceded by a 

 sleigh drawn by especially fleet horses. On making a care 

 ful examination, they found that this sleigh bore from 

 bank to bank a number of kegs of specie sufficient to enable 



