Rhode Island managed her issues wildly. The history of her financial recklessness, by E. R. Potter, was published in 1837, and reprinted by Henry Phillips, Jr., in his _Historical Sketches_, etc. This paper as enlarged by S. S. Rider in 1880, constitutes no. viii. of the _Rhode Island Historical Tracts_, under the title of _Bills of Credit and Paper Money of Rhode Island, 1710-1786_, with twenty fac-similes of early bills. In 1741 Gov. Ward made an official report to the Lords Commissioners of Trade, rehearsing the history of the Rhode Island issues from 1710 to 1740, and this report, with other documents relating to the paper money of that colony, is in the _Rhode Island Col. Records_, vol. v. (1741-56). Towards the end of Dudley’s time in Massachusetts, the party lines became sharply drawn on questions of financial policy. The downfall of credit alarmed the rich and conservative. The active business men, not many in numbers, but strong in influence, found a flow of paper money helpful in making the capital of the rich and the labor of the poor subserve their interests, as Hildreth says. There were those who supposed some amelioration would come from banks, private and public, and the press teemed with pamphlets.[396] The aggressive policy was formulated in _A Projection for erecting a Bank of Credit in Boston, New England, founded on Land Security_, in 1714.[397] Its abettors endeavored to promote subscriptions by appealing to the friends of education, in a promise to devote £200 per annum to the advantage of Harvard College.[398] The small minority of hard-money men cast in their lot with the advocates of a public bank as the lesser evil of the two. Gov. Dudley was no favorer of the Land-bank scheme[399] and his son, Paul Dudley, attacked it in a pamphlet, _Objections to the Bank of Credit lately projected at Boston_[400] (Oct., 1714), to which an answer came in Dec., from Samuel Lynde and other upholders, called _A Vindication of the Bank of Credit_.[401] “Of nearly thirty pamphlets and tracts, printed from 1714 to 1721,[402] for or against a private bank or a public bank,” says Dr. Trumbull,[403] “that of Dudley was the first, and is in some respects the ablest;” but he places foremost among the advocates of the scheme the author of _A Word of Comfort to a Melancholy Country_ (Boston, 1721), purporting to be by “Amicus Patriæ,” or, as Trumbull thinks (p. 40) there is little doubt, by the famous Rev. John Wise, of Chebacco. (Cf. _Brinley Catal._, i. nos. 1,442-45.)