The commercial and agricultural interests of the province began to suffer about this time for want of a sufficient quantity of a circulating medium. Divers means of relief were proposed, among them the issue of bills of credit. Governor Keith and the majority of the traders, merchants, and farmers were enchanted with the notion of fiat money, and overlooked or were unwilling to profit by the experiences of other provinces which had already suffered from the mischievous consequences of such a measure. The result was that, after considerable discussion, turning not so much upon the bills of credit themselves as upon the mode of issuing them and the method of guarding against their depreciation, the emission of £15,000 was authorized, despite the order of the king in council of May 19, 1720, which forbade all the governors of the colonies in America to pass any laws sanctioning the issue of bills of credit. It would lead us too far beyond the limits of this chapter to inquire whether, as Dr. Douglass, of Boston, suggested in 1749, the assembly ordering this emission of £15,000 bills of credit, and another of £30,000 in the same year, was “a legislature of debtors, the representatives of people who, from incogitancy, idleness, and profuseness, have been under a necessity of mortgaging their lands.” All the safeguards thrown around such a currency to prevent its depreciation proved in the end futile. The acts creating this debt of £45,000[485] provided for its redemption a pledge of real estate in fee simple of double the value, recorded in an office created for that purpose. The money so lent out was to be repaid into the office annually, in such instalments as would make it possible to sink the whole original issue within a certain number of years. In the first three years the sinking and destruction of the redeemed bills went on as directed by law; but under its operation the community found itself suffering from the contraction, although only about one seventh of the debt had been paid. The legislature, therefore, passed a law (1726) directing that the bills should not be destroyed, as the former acts required, but that, during the following eight years, they should be reissued. The population of the province, growing by natural increase and by immigration, seeming to require a larger volume of currency, a new emission of £30,000 was ordered in 1729 under the provisions of the laws of 1723. In 1731 the law of 1726 was reënacted, to prevent disasters which threatened the farmer as well as the merchant, and to avoid making new acts for emitting more bills. In 1739 the amount of bills in circulation, £68,890, was increased to £80,000, equal to £50,000 sterling, because the legislature had discovered that the former sum fell “short of a proper medium for negotiating the commerce and for the support of the government.” They justified this step, and tried to explain why a pound of Pennsylvania currency was of so much