In a large part of the territory now the United States the early settlers lived in the rudest kind of log cabins and knew no other money than whiskey and the skins of wild beasts. In 1780, after the collapse of the continental currency, it seemed there was no money in the country, and in the absence of a circulating medium there was a reversion to the practice of barter, and the revival of business was thus further impeded. Whiskey in North Carolina and tobacco in Virginia did duty as measures of value. In Pennsylvania what a bank bill was at Philadelphia or a shilling piece at Lancaster, whiskey was in the towns and villages that lay along the banks of the Monongahela river. It was the money, the circulating medium of the country. A gallon of good whiskey at every store in Pittsburgh, and at every farmhouse in the four counties of Washington, Westmoreland, Alleghany, and Fayette, was the equivalent of a shilling. And when, in 1797, the government began to coin new money for the people, the new coins did not, many of them, go far from the seaports and great towns. In the country districts, in the Ohio valley, on the northern border they were still unknown. The school-master received his pittance in French crowns and Spanish half-joes. The boatmen were paid their hire in shillings and pence, and if perchance some traveler paid his reckoning at a tavern with a few American coins, they were beheld with wonder by every lounger who came there to smoke and drink. _Temperance Societies_ The first prohibitory law was that of Georgia, in 1733, and the first dawn of temperance sentiment was undoubtedly the pledge of Governor Winthrop, still earlier than this, when he announced his famous discountenance of health drinking. This first of all temperance pledges in New England is recorded in his diary in language as temperate as his intent: "The Governor, upon consideration of the inconveniences which have grown in New England by drinking one to another, restrained it at his own table, and wished others to do the like; so it grew little by little, into disuse." Lyman Beecher claims the Massachusetts temperance society formed in 1813 to be the first one, the pledge of its members being to discontinue the use of liquor at entertainments, funerals, and auction sales, and to abstain from furnishing laborers with grog during haying time, as was then the custom. John B. Gough, however, mentions the constitution of a temperance society formed in New York in 1809, one of whose by-laws was, "Any member of this association who shall be convicted of intoxication shall be fined a quarter of a dollar, except such act of intoxication shall take place on the Fourth of July, or any other regularly appointed military muster."