And at the same time, Biddle was writing to the president of his Boston branch[670] that “the ties of party allegiance can only be broken by the actual conviction of existing distress,” and that “nothing but the evidence of suffering abroad will produce any effect in Congress”; and to Major Jack Downing in New York that “if the bank were to suffer itself to be misled into the measure of making money plentiful, it will only give to its enemies the triumph of having robbed it with impunity.”[671] Thus the evidence is abundant that the Bank exerted its power to the utmost to bring the country to the verge of ruin, and so compel it to consent to a recharter. The fact that the majority of its victims were among its most zealous supporters did not interest Mr. Biddle.[672] Two days after writing the letter to Downing, Biddle determined upon a further contraction in discounts to the amount of $3,320,000, with orders that this should be made within thirty or sixty days, and the largest reductions were to be made in the Western and Southwestern banks. Not content with this, he made another increase in the rates of exchange, and here again discriminated frankly against the West. Thus, in eight months the Bank planned a reduction in discounts to the amount of $13,300,000, which Catterall describes truly as “a preposterously large sum.”[673] When to this is added the further restrictions of as much as $5,000,000 through the breaking up of the exchange dealings of the Bank, the contraction in eight months amounted to at least $18,300,000. Had the Bank acted honorably, there would have been an inevitable depression for the time because of the removal order, but the panic was the Bank’s panic, deliberately conceived, and cruelly produced, with the frankly avowed purpose of blackmailing the American people into granting another charter. In his letter to the president of the Boston branch, Biddle had bluntly confessed his purpose. “I have no doubt,” he wrote, “that such a course will ultimately lead to a restoration of the currency, and the recharter of the Bank.”[674]