estimated in March last at more than $30,000,000; the
extension to traders in the interior of our country of credits for
supplies greatly beyond the wants of the people; the investment of
$39,500,000 in unproductive public lands in the years 1835 and 1836,
whilst in the preceding year the sales amounted to only four and a
half millions; the creation of debts, to an almost countless amount,
for real estate in existing or anticipated cities and villages,
equally unproductive, and at prices now seen to have been greatly
disproportionate to their real value; the expenditure of immense sums
in improvements which in many cases have been found to be ruinously
improvident; the diversion to other pursuits of much of the labor that
should have been applied to agriculture, thereby contributing to the
expenditure of large sums in the importation of grain from Europe--an
expenditure which, amounting in 1834 to about $250,000, was in the first
two quarters of the present year increased to more than $2,000,000; and
finally, without enumerating other injurious results, the rapid growth
among all classes, and especially in our great commercial towns, of
luxurious habits founded too often on merely fancied wealth, and
detrimental alike to the industry, the resources, and the morals of
our people.

It was so impossible that such a state of things could long continue
that the prospect of revulsion was present to the minds of considerate
men before it actually came. None, however, had correctly anticipated
its severity. A concurrence of circumstances inadequate of themselves to
produce such widespread and calamitous embarrassments tended so greatly
to aggravate them that they can not be overlooked in considering their
history. Among these may be mentioned, as most prominent, the great loss
of capital sustained by our commercial emporium in the fire of December,
1835--a loss the effects of which were underrated at the time because
postponed for a season by the great facilities of credit then existing;
the disturbing effects in our commercial cities of the transfers of
the public moneys required by the deposit law of June, 1836, and the
measures adopted by the foreign creditors of our merchants to reduce
their debts and to withdraw from the United States a large portion of
our specie.

However unwilling any of our citizens may heretofore have been to assign
to these causes the chief instrumentality in producing the present state
of things,