Excerpt from A Brief Account of the Finances and Paper Money of the Revolutionary War This large increase in the amount of bills in circulation naturally occasioned a greater depreciation, so that in 1748 eleven hundred pounds of these bills were only equal to one hundred pounds sterling. 3. Governor Pownall gives this account of the Pennsylvania system: "I will venture to say there never was a wiser or a better measure, never one better calculated to serve the uses of an increasing country, that there never was a measure more steadily or more faithfully pursued, for forty years together, than the loan office in Pennsylvania, formed and administered by the Assembly of that province." He gives a sketch of the loan office act passed in the year 1739, which he styles "the completest system of the kind, containing all the improvements which experience had from time to time suggested in the execution of the preceding acts. By this act the trustees of the loan office were to lend out the bills on real security of at least double the value for a term of sixteen years, to be repaid in yearly quotas or instalments with interest. Thus one-sixteenth part of the principal was yearly paid back into the office, which made the payments easy to the borrower. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.