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A great part of the proprietors, when they paid in their first

instalment, opened a cash-account with the bank; and the

directors, thinking themselves obliged to treat their own

proprietors with the same liberality with which they treated all

other men, allowed many of them to borrow upon this cash-account

what they paid in upon all their subsequent instalments. Such

payments, therefore, only put into one coffer what had the moment

before been taken out of another. But had the coffers of this

bank been filled ever so well, its excessive circulation must

have emptied them faster than they could have been replenished by

any other expedient but the ruinous one of drawing upon London;

and when the bill became due, paying it, together with interest

and commission, by another draught upon the same place. Its

coffers having been filled so very ill, it is said to have been

driven to this resource within a very few months after it began

to do business.