This loan-office law was, however, the last in Pennsylvania.[208] The establishment of banks, for facilitating the purposes of trade, together with the great improvements and wealth to which the landed interest of the state had attained, by means of a widely extended foreign commerce, coming in aid of the benefits which the cultivators had previously derived from the loan-office system, superseded, in a great degree, the utility of this institution. In one year after the last loan-office was erected, the law for that purpose was repealed; the repealing act declaring—that it had been found inexpedient, and not to answer the purposes intended by the legislature. In fact, the establishment of banks in the interior of the country, not only supplies the place of a loan-office, in relation to the farmer, but greatly facilitates the extensive inland trade of the state. Experience has demonstrated, that, operating in this way, they are productive of all the important advantages of the loan-office system: and of this institution, the late governor Pownall speaks in these remarkable words—“I will venture to say, that there never was a wiser or a better measure; never one better calculated to serve the uses of an increasing country; that there never was a measure more steadily pursued, or more faithfully executed, for forty years together,[209] than the loan-office in Pennsylvania, formed and administered by the assembly of that province.”[210] ----- Footnote 208: Mr. Rittenhouse continued to hold the place of a trustee of the loan-office more than ten years; but on the 1st of April, 1790, a law was passed, by which all the powers and duties of the trustees of that institution were transferred to, and vested in, the treasurer of the state. Footnote 209: The loan-office system was kept up, in Pennsylvania, thirty years after governor Pownall wrote. Footnote 210: Paper-money was not so well managed in some of the other colonies, where it was issued in too large quantities, and its credit not established on funds sufficiently stable and secure;[210a] a circumstance which induced the parliament of Great-Britain to interdict, for a time, further emissions of that sort of money, called bills of credit, by the provincial legislatures. Although the last emission of loan-office bills of credit, under the colonial government of Pennsylvania, was made in the beginning of the year 1773, the want of this succedaneum for gold and silver, as a circulating medium of commerce commensurate to the encreased population and trade of the country, was experienced some considerable time before. In a letter written by the Hon. Mr. T. Penn to the Rev. Mr. Barton, dated, London, June 17, 1767, the writer says: