Withdrawn, or rather withheld (for they were never withdrawn), from the Bank of the United States, the revenues of the Federal Government were deposited as fast as they accrued in specie-paying State banks. They were paid in the notes of the thousand banks, good, bad, and indifferent, whose promises to pay constituted the paper currency of the day. It was this money which the Whigs, aided by Democratic recusants, proposed to give away to the States. They passed an Act requiring it to be _deposited_ with the States,--ostensibly as a safe and convenient method of keeping it; but nobody believed that it would ever be called for, or paid if it was. It was simply an extraordinary largess; and pending the very embarrassment caused by itself, when the government had not a dollar wherewith to pay even a pension, and the temporary expedient was an issue of treasury notes against the better judgment of the party in power, the possibility of withdrawing these deposits was never taken into the account. The Act went into effect on the 1st of January, 1837, and was one of the immediate causes of the suspension and disasters of that year. "The condition of our deposit banks was desperate,--wholly inadequate to the slightest pressure on their vaults in the ordinary course of business, much less that of meeting the daily government drafts and the approaching deposit of near forty millions with the States." Nevertheless, the deposits began at the rate of ten millions to the quarter. The deposit banks "blew up;" and all the others, including that of the United States, closed their doors to customers and bill-holders, which gave them more time to hold public meetings, imputing the distress of the country to the hard-money policy of Jackson and Van Buren, and agitating for the re-charter of Mr. Biddle's profligate concern as the only remedy human ingenuity could devise.