As a starting-point for a new education at fifty-five years
old, the shock of finding one's self suspended, for several
months, over the edge of bankruptcy, without knowing how one got
there, or how to get away, is to be strongly recommended. By slow
degrees the situation dawned on him that the banks had lent him,
among others, some money -- thousands of millions were -- as
bankruptcy -- the same -- for which he, among others, was
responsible and of which he knew no more than they. The humor of
this situation seemed to him so much more pointed than the
terror, as to make him laugh at himself with a sincerity he had
been long strange to. As far as he could comprehend, he had
nothing to lose that he cared about, but the banks stood to lose
their existence. Money mattered as little to him as to anybody,
but money was their life. For the first time he had the banks in
his power; he could afford to laugh; and the whole community was
in the same position, though few laughed. All sat down on the
banks and asked what the banks were going to do about it. To
Adams the situation seemed farcical, but the more he saw of it,
the less he understood it. He was quite sure that nobody
understood it much better. Blindly some very powerful energy was
at work, doing something that nobody wanted done. When Adams went
to his bank to draw a hundred dollars of his own money on
deposit, the cashier refused to let him have more than fifty, and
Adams accepted the fifty without complaint because he was himself
refusing to let the banks have some hundreds or thousands that
belonged to them.
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