We are not yet, however, at the end of the political acts which threw the money market into convulsions. The opposition succeeded, in the summer of the presidential election year, 1836, in passing an act to _deposit_ with the states the surplus over a balance of five millions in the Treasury on January 1, 1837. The amount was thirty-seven millions. This sum was scattered in eighty-nine deposit banks all over the country. Its distribution was, therefore, controlled by local pressure and political favoritism, not by the needs of the government (for it did not need the money at all) or by the demand and supply of capital. The banks had regarded it as a permanent deposit and had loaned it in aid of the various public and private enterprises which were being pushed on every hand at such a rate that labor was said to be drawn away from agriculture so that the country was importing bread stuffs. It was now to be withdrawn and transferred once more, and this time it was said that, if these “deposits” were such an advantage, the states ought to have it, and could then, as well as the banks, be called on to give back the money whenever it might be needed. The deposit took place in 1837, in three installments, January, April, and July, and amounted to twenty-eight millions. The fourth installment was never paid. The money was all squandered or worse. The charter of the Bank of the United States was to expire on the 3d of March, 1836. One year before that time the directors ordered the “exchange committee” to loan the capital, as fast as it should be released, on stocks, so as to prepare for winding up. From this resolution dates the subsequent history of the Bank, for the exchange committee consisted of the President and two directors selected by him, to whose hands the whole business of the Bank was hereby entrusted. The branches were sold and the capital gradually released throughout 1835, but in February, 1836, an act was suddenly passed by the Pennsylvania legislature to charter the United States Bank of Pennsylvania, continuing the old Bank. The act was said to have been obtained by bribery, but investigation failed to prove it. The most open bribery was on the face of it, for it provided for several pet local schemes of public improvement, for a bonus and loans to the state by the Bank, and for abolishing taxes--provisions which secured the necessary support to carry it.