The paper money matter was a more complicated affair, and one which the ignorant settlers were naturally unable to comprehend. The monetary system of the Colony was practically an inheritance from the days of Dutch rule. The Company had not been very scrupulous about the security of its paper money, and the succeeding Batavian Government seems to have been utterly unscrupulous. In 1807 Lord Caledon found mercantile transactions in an almost lifeless state, and the currency not only depreciated and contracted, but the subject of usurious charges of all kinds. Every effort was made by him and succeeding Governors to effect a betterment in the mass of half-useless paper which was floating about, and, by 1825, there remained only some three and a half million dollars' worth in nominal value, of which one-third had been created by the British authorities in various attempts to ease the financial situation, while the greater part of the balance was of Dutch origin. Lord Charles Somerset finally took the desperate, but apparently necessary, course of cutting down the currency to three-eighths of its nominal value and making British silver money a legal tender at that rate of exchange. The result was the practical ruin of a number of people and the creation of much discontent; but at the same time the measure placed trade and commerce upon a permanent footing and laid the basis of future monetary safety. For the time, however, it was like the amputation of a limb in the case of an ignorant and unsatisfied patient--producing suffering and discontent without that feeling which a belief in the necessity of the operation and confidence in the skill of the physician would have given. [Sidenote: Other Grievances or Reforms]