On the four or five years of inflated prosperity there followed four or five years of the most slow and grinding distress. 1843 is the year of lowest prices in our history, and the year of severest restriction in industry. In 1842 the United States Treasury was under protest and actually bankrupt, and American credit was so low that an agent of the general government who was sent to Europe to try to place a loan of only twelve million dollars there could not do it at all. In that same year, however, out of what income it did have, the general government distributed six hundred thousand dollars, which came from land, amongst the states. As for calling back any of the twenty-eight millions deposited with the states, no effort of the kind was ever made. The states were complaining that the fourth installment, to which they had a right, had never been paid to them. The question is sometimes mooted whether a national debt is a curse or a blessing. There can be no doubt whatever that a national surplus is a curse. In the years before 1837 there had been a great deal of eloquence spent upon “the credit system.” After 1837 this matter was dropped. By the credit system they meant the multiplication of bank notes which were false promises. The notion was that the system of using these in business gave poor men an easier chance to get rich. At first they were loaned easily at low rates. Then, as prices rose and speculation became active, interest advanced. The “poor men” found themselves forced to submit to more and more ruinous renewals, all the heavier because of the usury law, until they lost all they had ever really owned. The question, then, is how much better off than they were would the poor men of 1830 have been in 1845 if they had gone on slowly earning and saving capital and making no use of credit at all. As it was, the poor men of 1830, after supposing themselves rich in 1836, were all bankrupt in 1845. Such is the course of every inflation of the currency. It is proved by hundreds of instances; and there is no delusion which it seems so hard to stamp out of the minds of men as this, that in business we can make something out of nothing, although we cannot in chemistry or mechanics. Nothing more surely tempts the man without capital to his ruin than the easy credit which accompanies the first stages of inflation.