Difficulties checked the original agreement and in the end São Paulo faced the situation alone—meanwhile the harvest was coming in, and the price of coffee dropped below thirty francs a bag—obtaining a preliminary loan of £1,000,000 on August 1, 1906, from the Brasilianische Bank für Deutschland, for a one-year term; in December £2,000,000 was obtained through J. Henry Schroeder & Company of London, and subsequently the National City Bank of New York negotiated another million sterling. The money was used to buy and store the coffee of the Brazilian plantations, and was rendered sufficient only by the co-operation of fazendeiros and exporting houses. In June, 1907, São Paulo held 8,000,000 bags of coffee, buying only high types and through the sole agency of Theodore Wille and Company, a strong coffee exporting firm of Brazil. When Minas and Rio protested against the exclusion of their eight and nine type coffees from the stores, the Federal Government at last actively assisted, lending the State of São Paulo ten million francs for the purchase of the lower types. In July, 1907, S. Paulo stopped buying. She had acquired over 8,000,000 bags, one-third of the total purchase price of 400,000,000 francs coming from foreign loans and the remainder from advances by commission houses in Brazil on coffee consigned to their keeping. Subsequent sums for the redemption of this coffee were obtained: two million pounds sterling came from Rothschild’s through the Federal Government, and a similar sum was obtained by the lease of the (State) Sorocabana railway to the Farquhar syndicate. With the exception of a few hundred thousand sacks all this coffee was sent to different world markets for storage until opportune sales could be made; for a whole year not one ounce of it was sold, and then, when the next Paulista harvest turned out to fill only five million bags, the preciously guarded coffee was dealt out warily to a firm market at an average price of sixty francs a bag. Without this action Brazilians say that the price must have fallen to twenty francs. At the end of 1908 financial adjustments were made; older debts were covered by a new loan of £15,000,000 arranged with an international syndicate headed by Schroeder of London and the Société Générale of Paris. These houses took £5,000,000 each, and the remainder was distributed between Germany, Belgium and New York. The loan was guaranteed by the coffee surtax, raised to five francs a bag, and by the seven million bags remaining in international warehouses. Havre, with nearly two million bags, was the greatest holder of the valorized coffee, and it continued to be sold during the next five years only when the price offered profits.