Besides genteel presents to the officers who behaved well last campaign at Monongahela, and a gratuity of £5 per man to every common soldier of our own regiment who survived the action, and pensions or presents to the disabled and to the widows of the slain, which amounted to a round sum; and besides levying money to pay the owners for upwards of one thousand hogsheads of tobacco, burnt in the warehouses of Bolling's Point, £40,000 was voted for His Majesty's service and our own defence, then, and £65,000 more this spring. This, as little or no tobacco was made last summer, falls heavily on the lower ranks of people, especially, as tobacco is the only medium of raising money, and as they generally cultivate the meanest lands, so were their crops proportionally short. Of this the legislature has been so sensible, that an act, to continue in force one year, was last fall passed, indulging the people by allowing them to pay off their public dues to the secretary, the county court clerks, the clergy and other public creditors (which ever before had been payable in tobacco), in money, at the rate of two pence per pound. The current market value has, hitherto, been twenty-six shillings per hundred, so that the law saves to those who have tobacco to sell, four pounds thirteen shillings and four pence per thousand, while it deducts the same from the annual salaries and revenues of the creditors. In my own case, who am entitled to upwards of seventeen thousand weight of tobacco per annum, the difference amounts to a considerable sum. However, each individual must expect to share in the misfortunes of the community to which he belongs.
Furthermore, to enable people to pay their taxes and debts, paper money has been issued, which, in every colony where it
