Robert Carter Nicholas, Robinson's successor as Treasurer, was bitter in condemnation of what he had done. "The seeming mysteries of our exchange now begin to unfold themselves," he wrote in a letter to the _Gazette_. "It comes out that a great part of the money squeezed from the people for their taxes, instead of being sunk ... was thrown back into circulation." The Assembly had given their word that they would protect the interests of the British merchants by burning the paper promptly on the dates of their retirement. What must the world think when these good intentions had been in part defeated by a strange kind of misconduct? What made it worse was the need the colony had for the friendship of the merchants at a time when the great men in England had their eyes fixed upon all the Assemblies. "The consequences are as glaring as the sun in the meridian."[36] Nicholas saw to it that the law was obeyed. As the notes came in they were burnt. As a result the exchange began to drop until in a few months it became normal. The day of easy money was over, and the host of debtors faced ruin. For many months the pages of the _Gazette_ were crowded with notices of slaves and plantations for sale. In the meanwhile, the century and a half old struggle between mother country and colonies was rapidly approaching a crisis. The issue had long been postponed because of the inactivity of the King's ministers, who were content to close their eyes to what was going on across the Atlantic. But the time was at hand when the question of whether the Americans should be governed from London or should govern themselves had to be settled. This was in part due to the fact that as time passed Parliament had grown less and less representative of the people. In Great Britain there was no provision, as there is in the Constitution of the United States, for periodic reapportionments of the people's representatives to keep step with changes in population. For centuries most of the Commons had been elected under a very restricted franchise by certain old boroughs. Though with the passing of the decades many of these boroughs, once centers of population and wealth, had fallen into decay, they still sent their representatives to the House of Commons. Perhaps the most notorious was Old Sarum, a city of Norman times, whose castle and cathedral and crowded houses overlooked the Salisbury plain, but which for centuries had been deserted. Unless the ghosts of men long dead were to have a voice in running the nation, it was absurd for these old ruins to be represented in the Commons. In practice the rotten borough system, as it was called, tended to perpetuate the ascendency of the landed proprietors.