The “disciplining” of the people began with the Bank’s first curtailments on August 13, 1833, and practically ended on July 11, 1834, although it continued to some extent until September. The first move--a proper one--was to issue an order that the amount of money loaned on discounts was not to be increased, and that bills of exchange should be drawn only at short dates and on the Eastern offices. These orders meant inevitable contraction, but of the sort that could be justified. But immediately after Taney had issued his order, the Bank adopted additional measures--the reduction of discounts, the application of the order of restriction on the drawing of bills to all the offices of the Bank, the collection of the balances against the State banks, and the restriction of the receipt of State bank notes. The historian of the Bank truly says that “on the whole, nothing but peril to the Bank could excuse such measures.”[663] But even this second step seemed all too mild to the officers and directors in the marble front building on Chestnut Street, and three weeks later a third step was taken. The branch banks in the West were ordered to persevere in “the course of measures already prescribed,” and instructed that an extraordinary effort should be made to keep down circulation, and to avoid drafts on the northern Atlantic offices.[664] One month later, Philip Hone, the New York banker and business man, was recording in his diary that the “ill-advised and arbitrary step of the President” was “producing an awful scarcity of money, with immediate distress and melancholy forebodings to the merchants and others who require credit to sustain them”; and that “stocks of every description have fallen--Delaware and Hudson from one hundred and twenty-five to one hundred and fourteen, Boston and Providence from one hundred and fifteen to one hundred and three,” and that “money cannot be had on bond and mortgage at 7 per cent, and I am told that good notes will hardly be discounted at 9 per cent.”[665]