In the late Province of the Massachusetts Bay, from the years 1745 to 1750, we had full experience of the operation of paper money. The Province engaged in expensive expeditions against Louisburg and Canada, which occasioned a too plentiful emission of paper money, in consequence of which, it depreciated to seven and a half for one. In 1750, the British Parliament granted a sum of money to the Province to reimburse it, for what it had expended more than its proportion in the general expense of the empire. This sum was brought over to Boston in silver and gold, and the Legislature determined to redeem all their paper with it at the depreciated value. There was a similar alarm at first, and before the matter was understood, but after the people had time to think upon it, all were satisfied to receive silver at fifty shillings an ounce, although the face of the bills promised an ounce of silver for every six shillings and eight pence. At that time, the British merchants were more interested in our paper money, in proportion, than any Europeans now are; yet they did not charge the Province with a breach of faith, or stigmatise this as an act of bankruptcy. On the contrary, they were satisfied with it. I beg leave to remind your Excellency, that at that time, the laws of Massachusetts were subject not only to the negative of the King's Governor, but to a revision by the King in Council, and were there liable to be affirmed or annulled. And from the partial preference, which your Excellency well knows, was uniformly given to the subjects of the King, within the realm, when they came in competition with those of the subjects of the Colonies, there is no reason to doubt, that if that measure, when thoroughly considered, had been unjust in itself, but the merchants in England would have taken an alarm, and procured the act to be disallowed by the King in Council. Yet the merchants in England, who well understood their own interests, were quite silent upon this occasion, and the law was confirmed in the Council; nor can it be supposed to have been confirmed there in a manner unnoticed. It had met with too much opposition among a certain set of interested speculators in the then Province, for that supposition to be made. And the case of the British merchants, at that time, differed in no respect from the present case of the French, or other foreign merchants, except that the credits of the former were vastly greater, and they must have, consequently, been more deeply interested in that measure of government, than the latter are in the present one. Their acquiescence in the measure, and the confirmation of that act, must have rested upon the full conviction of the British administration and of the merchants, of the justice of it. Your Excellency will agree, in the difficulty of making any distinction between the French merchant and the Spanish or Dutch merchant, by any general rule; for all these are interested in this business.