But of all classes, the tradesmen of Dublin, who were generally Protestants, were the greatest losers. At first, of course, they raised their demands; but the magistrates of the city took on themselves to meet this heretical inclination by putting forth a tariff regulating prices. Any man who belonged to the caste now dominant might walk into a shop, lay on the counter a bit of brass worth threepence, and carry off goods to the value of half a guinea. Legal remedies were out of the question. Indeed the sufferers thought themselves happy if, by the sacrifice of their stock in trade, they could redeem their limbs and their lives. There was not a baker's shop in the city round which twenty or thirty soldiers were not constantly prowling. Some persons who refused the base money were arrested by troopers and carried before the Provost Marshal, who cursed them, swore at them, locked them up in dark cells, and, by threatening to hang them at their own doors, soon overcame their resistance. Of all the plagues of that time none made a deeper or a more lasting impression on the minds of the Protestants of Dublin than the plague of brass money. To the recollection of the confusion and misery which had been produced by James' coin must be in part ascribed the strenuous opposition which, thirty-five years later, large classes firmly attached to the House of Hanover, offered to the government of George the First in the affair of Woods' Patent.[4] [4] Macaulay, _History of England_, I, chap. XII. "The Affair of Woods' Patent" is celebrated in Swift's Drapier letters. But paper money offers far more extensive facilities to knavery than a metallic currency. In his _Essays on the Monetary History of the United States_,[5] Mr. Charles J. Bullock has described in sufficient detail the "carnival of fraud and corruption" which attended the paper money coined or rather printed by most of the American colonies in the century preceding the American Revolution. Thus, about the middle of the eighteenth century, the paper money of Massachusetts fell to an eighth of its original value. People were driven to barter, and one writer observed that "the morals of the people depreciate with the currency." Parties were divided into debtors and creditors, and a New England writer in 1749 noted: "The Debtor side has had the ascendant ever since anno 1741 to the almost utter ruin of the country."[6] To this writer belongs the credit of discerning, at a time when even Benjamin Franklin was in error, that "the repeated large emissions of Paper Money" were responsible for its depreciation. [5] Macmillan, 1900. [6] Douglass.