LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS 17 



of wheat for such a note would have such a precise 

 knowledge of how much it was going to be worth to 

 him ! But in financial matters, where the wish is so 

 apt to father the thought, there seems to be no delu- 

 sion too gross to find supporters. By 1 740 the Land 

 Bank and the Specie Bank had both been put into 

 operation, in spite of Governor Belcher, who dissolved 

 the assembly, cashiered colonels, disbenched justices, 

 and turned out office-holders to right and left, for the 

 offence of receiving and passing the notes ; and pres- 

 ently a flagrant political issue was raised. Finding 

 that paper professing to represent at least ,50,000 

 had been issued by the Land Bank, the governor 

 appealed to Parliament for help, and in this he was 

 upheld by some of the best men in Massachusetts. 

 This was in Walpole's time, and his Parliaments 

 handled American affairs more delicately than those 

 of George III.; it happened that a new statute ex- 

 pressly for this occasion was not needed. Twenty 

 years before, upon the collapse of the famous South 

 Sea Bubble, an act had been passed forbidding the 

 incorporation of joint stock companies with more than 

 six partners. Parliament now simply declared that 

 this act was always of force in the colonies as well as 

 in Great Britain. The two Massachusetts companies 

 were thus abruptly compelled to wind up their affairs 

 and redeem their scrip ; and as the partners were held 

 individually liable, they incurred heavy losses, and 

 would have been quickly ruined if the claims against 

 them had been rigorously pressed. One of the directors 

 of the Land Bank, and perhaps the wealthiest of its 

 partners, \vas the elder Samuel Adams, deacon of the 

 Old South Church, and one of the justices of the 



