128 BANKING THEORIES IN UNITED STATES

ing of a bank upon these principles, and the contemporaneous
establishment of a land bank, brought the controversy between
the advocates of each type to a climax in 1740. That post notes
would be discounted with respect to demand notes was recognized
 by those who opposed the introduction of both silver bank
and land bank. It was also conceded by some of those who sponsored
 the emission of post notes. These latter thought that the
issue of such notes, on condition that those who received them
repay the loans in silver, was the only feasible means of procuring
sufficient specie to enable the return to a specie standard.

When we come to the period following the development of
commercial banking in the United States, we find convertibility
taken more or less for granted by most of the writers, as we should
expect. Stoppage of specie payments by the banks, ‘“unbanks
them at once,” declared Richard Hildreth, “and changes them
into mere machines for manufacturing paper money of no particular
 value.” ! And, due allowance being made for rhetorical
hyperbole, the great majority of his contemporaries undoubtedly
agreed with him, that “non-specie-paying banks are the greatest
nuisances with which a country can be cursed.” > The systematic
treatises on money and banking that began to appear about 1820,
usually contained repetition of the trite commonplaces that explained
 the merits of the precious metals as the monetary standard
and pointed out the necessity of requiring convertibility on
demand in order to prevent excessive extension of bank credit.
Yet there was not the same insistence upon the matter that we
find to-day. In actual practice it was not uncommon to place
such obstacles in the way of getting gold and silver from the banks
as to make a mockery of their promise to pay upon demand. Nor
did local opinion fail, in many cases, to uphold the banks. And
temporary suspension of specie payments was frequently tolerated
 with a measure of stoicism that seems strange to us to-day.
William Crawford wrote in his Finance Report of 1820, that in
“all great exigencies, which, in the course of human events, may

1 Hildreth, Banks, Banking, and Paper Currencies (1840), p. 176.
2 Ibid... 177.