"In general, it was a currency based upon the 'banking principle.' It was issued against general assets--not against the deposit of bonds. It was secured in addition, in most of the states, by the further liability of officers and stockholders, or by a first lien upon all the assets of the bank, or both. It was limited--rather loosely, we would now say--to one hundred and twenty-five or one hundred per cent of the capital. But though issued under the legislation of six different states, it was in reality a single currency system--made so through the agency of a commercial enterprise, established and carried on without the aid of law. The bills of banks in any one part of New England passed at par in every other part; and for years the notes of New England banks had been enjoying an extended circulation in the west, where its reputation found for it ready acceptance. At home, too, its valuable points were appreciated and its forced transference to the national system a matter of regret. "The history of New England bank currency, thus closed, is significant for two developments which characterize it: "First, the steady growth, under the teachings of experience, of the system as to the issue and regulation of bank currency, which has since then become generally approved among the English-speaking peoples of the New World. In one direction after another special opportunities for fraud or exploitation of a confiding public by rash banking developed their legitimate disasters and prompted the invention of remedies 'to fit the crime.' Conditions were so nearly alike throughout the New England states that each was prompt to suffer from any financial disease affecting any other, and equally prompt to adopt, with such improvements as its own enterprise might suggest, the remedies which had been found effectual elsewhere. As a result, the complete system, at the time of its practical suppression by the National Bank Act, was utilizing nearly every expedient to secure safe and conservative banking that were then or have since been incorporated in our own National Banking system, or in that of Canada--the two great plans which have since been matured. "A second feature was the development of redemption facilities and methods. Starting with absolute chaos, assisted by no law, progressing tentatively as each necessity prompted the invention of new means to meet it, the result was a carefully buttressed and easily working system, under which, to an extent never approached in its efficiency by any plan elsewhere created by law, the bank note currency of New England was made elastic, safe and ideally convenient and inexpensive in use.