Just about the time Hone was recording these conditions, Biddle was offering the notorious Samuel Swartwout, the Jacksonian Collector in New York, whose irregularities in office were to be unmercifully exploited by the Whigs, a directorship in the Bank, and the latter, declining because of the onerous duties of his office, advised that since “the Bank’s power has been shown” in the distress, it might be well now to manifest mercy.[666] Where Niles had found money scarce in September and October without being able to conceive a reason, he wrote in November of “a most severe pressure for money” and the prospect of a “collapse of business.” That month State bank notes began to depreciate and loans were at eighteen per cent per annum. With the convening of Congress and the President’s uncompromising Message in December, Biddle increased the pressure for the purposes of “discipline.” Business men were unable to get credit. Factories were shutting down because of the inability of manufacturers to get loans, and laborers were thrown out into the street. The Christmas season found New York “gloomy” with “times bad,” stocks still falling, and a panic prevailing “which will result in bankruptcies and ruin in many quarters where, a few short weeks ago, the sun of prosperity shone with unusual brightness.”[667] And three days later the Lord Holland of the American Whigs, in his misery and apprehension, was beginning to suspect that politics and the Bank, as well as Jackson’s “ill-advised and arbitrary step,” might be playing a part, and concluding that “between them both the community groans under the distress which these misunderstandings have created.” “A plague on both your houses,” he wrote, his impartial castigation springing, perhaps, from the fact that he had lost $20,000.[668] In January the crash came. Business houses began to fail in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, and by the end of the month loans could not be had in New York and Baltimore at less than one and a half per cent discount per month. Wages decreased, along with prices, with laborers out of employment and the real estate values on the slump. And at this time, with the Opposition in Congress working in hearty coöperation with the Bank to create the fear that fed the panic, Jackson sat in the White House one Sunday morning writing to Hamilton: “There is no real distress. It is only with those who live by borrowing, trade on loans, and gamblers in stocks. It would be a godsend to society if all such were put down.... I must stop. The church bells are ringing and I must attend.”[669] This theory that it would be a “godsend” to rid the country of the men who live on borrowing was to be used with considerable effect against Jackson by his congressional enemies.