Another great interest had grown to immense proportions in the East of 1830--the financial. Beginning with the flush times of Hamilton's leadership, the financier had grown in power and influence, sometimes purposely organizing a monopolistic control over the money of the public, as in the case of the Suffolk Bank of Boston, sometimes mercilessly robbing depositors, as in the notorious defalcation of the Derby Bank of Connecticut in 1825, until it had become a serious national problem not merely to regulate the currency of the country, but to curb the rapacity of those who, under one pretense or another, violated the laws of all the States in order to heap up hasty fortunes. In 1815 there had been 208 banks in the country, mainly in the Middle States and New England, with a capital of $82,000,000; at the end of the year 1833 there were 502 banks with a capital of $168,829,000. At the end of the second war with England, there were $17,000,000 of specie in the banks; eighteen years later, when the capital had doubled, loans had greatly increased, and notes in circulation were $61,000,000, there were still just $17,000,000 of gold and silver in all the banks. The business of the East naturally tended to the concentration of the financial resources of the country within her towns, but the location of 414 of the 502 banks of the country in the narrow section under consideration would seem to indicate something more than a natural tendency. The six million people of the East enjoyed three times as many banking facilities, when we consider the amount of money in circulation, as the seven million Southerners and Westerners. New York alone had a banking capital of $28,000,000, Massachusetts $21,000,000, and the _per capita_ circulation of money in the East was nearly $9, while that of the West was $2. To him that hath shall be given is a familiar axiom which seemed doubly true of the United States at the time of Jackson's accession to power. All signs pointed to a congestion of the financial resources of the whole country in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. The great National Bank, with its $35,000,000 capital and loans of $40,000,000, was located in Philadelphia; New York City had not so strong a banking system, but the growth of her real estate values was $40,000,000 in the five years preceding 1831; and the tax valuation of the property of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, in which Boston was located, was $86,000,000 as against $208,000,000 for the whole State.