ening his security to throw a heavier burden upon
the borrower. Almost all laws made to protect bor-
rowers of money react on the borrower, the lender
having the advantage. The suspension of several
banks threw the wheels of finance generally off the
track. Confidence in other banking houses was im-
paired ; the solvency of merchants was suspected. No
man felt that his ducats were safe unless he had
them in his own possession.
Likewise the effect upon the people of the suspen- sion of the two great express companies was much greater than that of all the banks combined. There was not a town of any consequence in the interior or on the coast from San Diego to Puget Sound, where one, or most generally both of these companies did not have offices. There thousands of miners and labor- ers had deposited their little all, preparatory to remit- ting to their friends at the east; they had there laid by a little for a rainy day, a nest egg, passage-money home, in fact their all, the result of years of hard labor — thousands, I say, throughout the length and breadth of the land, saw their money and their hopes thus suddenly cast away.
And if credits during the flush times were freely given, as a rule debts were promptly paid. Business was done upon honor. There was no law ; away from the larger towns there were no pretensions in the way of tribunals for the collection of debts. Had there been such they would have received little patronage. If the debtor was ill and unable to work, why molest him ? Poverty, there was none. When every rivulet and ravine yielded large returns to the application of pick and pan, he who was able to wield these implements could not be called poor. If the debtor was a rascal, and would not pay when he could, a knife would cut the difficulty, or a pistol-ball reach the wrong quicker than the law.
In the first flush of business upon the new Ameri- can high-pressure principle, after gold had been dis-
