The business of exchange was thus fast getting into hopeless confusion. It has been said of Bradshaw's Railway Guide, the indispensable companion of the traveller in England, that no man can study it for an hour without qualifying himself for an insane asylum. But Bradshaw is pellucid clearness compared with the American tables of exchange in 1786, with their medley of dollars and shillings, moidores and pistareens. The addition of half a dozen different kinds of paper created such a labyrinth as no human intellect could explore. No wonder that men were counted wise who preferred to take whiskey and pork instead. Nobody who had a yard of cloth to sell could tell how much it was worth. But even worse than all this was the swift and certain renewal of bankruptcy which so many states were preparing for themselves. [Sidenote: Distress in New England.] Nowhere did the warning come so quickly or so sharply as in New England. Connecticut, indeed, as already observed, came off scot-free. She had issued a little paper money soon after the battle of Lexington, but had stopped it about the time of the surrender of Burgoyne. In 1780 she had wisely and summarily adjusted all relations between debtor and creditor, and the crisis of 1786 found her people poor enough, no doubt, but able to wait for better times and indisposed to adopt violent remedies. It was far otherwise in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. These were preëminently the maritime states of the Union, and upon them the blows aimed by England at American commerce had fallen most severely. It was these two maritime states that suffered most from the cutting down of the carrying trade and the restriction of intercourse with the West Indies. These things worked injury to shipbuilding, to the exports of lumber and oil and salted fish, even to the manufacture of Medford rum. Nowhere had the normal machinery of business been thrown out of gear so extensively as in these two states, and in Rhode Island there was the added disturbance due to a prolonged occupation by the enemy's troops. Nowhere, perhaps, was there a larger proportion of the population in debt, and in these preëminently commercial communities private debts were a heavier burden and involved more personal suffering than in the somewhat patriarchal system of life in Virginia or South Carolina. In the time of which we are now treating, imprisonment for debt was common. High-minded but unfortunate men were carried to jail, and herded with thieves and ruffians in loathsome dungeons, for the crime of owing a hundred dollars which they could not promptly pay. Under such circumstances, a commercial disturbance, involving widespread debt, entailed an amount of personal suffering and humiliation of which, in these kinder days, we can form no adequate conception. It tended to make the debtor an outlaw, ready to entertain schemes for the subversion of society. In the crisis of 1786, the agitation in Rhode Island and