he purer.

The Serampore College and Mission lost all the funds it had in India.
By 1830 the financial revolution which had laid many houses low in
Europe five years before, began to tell upon the merchant princes of
Calcutta. The six firms, which had developed the trade of Northern
India so far as the Company's monopolies allowed, had been the bankers
of the Government itself, of states like Haidarabad, and of all the
civil and military officials, and had enriched a succession of partners
for half a century, fell one by one--fell for sixteen millions sterling
among them. Palmer and Co. was the greatest; the house at one time
played a large part in the history of India, and in the debates and
papers of Parliament. Mr. John Palmer, a personal friend of the
Serampore men, had advanced them money at ten per cent. four years
previously, when the Society's misrepresentation had done its worst.
The children in the Eurasian schools, which Dr. and Mrs. Marshman
conducted with such profit to the mission, depended chiefly on funds
deposited with this firm. It suddenly failed for more than two
millions sterling. Although the catastrophe exposed the rottenness of
the system of credit on which commerce and banking were at that time
conducted, in the absence of a free press and an intelligent public
opinion, the alarm soon subsided, and only the more business fell to
the other firms. But the year 1833 had hardly opened when first the
house of Alexander and Co., then that of Mackintosh and Co., and then
the three others, collapsed without warning. The English in India,
officials and merchants, were reduced to universal poverty. Capital
disappeared and credit ceased at the very time that Parliament was
about to complete the partial concession of freedom of trade made by
the charter of 1813, by granting all Carey had argued for, and allowing
Europeans to hold land.

The funds invested for Jessor and Delhi; the legacy of Fernandez,
Carey's first convert and missionary; his own tenths with which he
supported three aged relatives in England; the property of the partner
of his third marriage, on whom the money was settled, and who survived
him by a year; the little possessed by Dr. Marshman, who had paid all
his expenses in England even while working for the Society--all was
swept away. Not only was the small balance in hand towards meeting the
college and mission expenditure gone, but it was impossible to borrow
even for a short