Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 8.djvu/173

FINANCIAL HISTORY OF OKEGON. 165 holding courts, including the maintenance of the territorial library; the per diem and mileage of the members of the legis- lature, along with pay for its officers and clerks and the public printing and rent of halls, were all paid with moneys from the national treasury. The fund for all necessary territorial buildings were provided from the same source. Endowments in the form of liberal grants of the public domain were avail- able for the building up of funds for the support of common schools and higher education. The National Government, too, regularly stood sponsor for the common defense, but under the peculiar conditions of the situation in the Pacific North- west at this time, private resources in service and wealth were advanced voluntarily to meet exigent needs. What then would remain as the scope and function of a territorial system of finance? Unless the people of the territory were bent on undertaking costly public works, the rapid development of their system of public education, or were burdened with heavy expenses in maintaining an internal police and care of unfortunate classes, the scale of their fiscal operations would be narrow and quantitatively insignificant. And, indeed, so attenuated were the common territorial interests of the people, aside from those supported by means from the national treas- ury, that the territorial treasury for some three years (1849, 1850 and 1851) lapsed into innocuous desuetude. The newly appointed Governors, fresh from the East, betray by expressions in their inaugural messages to the Legislative Assembly the fact that they have been strongly impressed by something akin to community mendicancy or reversion to a tax-free primitiveness. The successive sessions of the Legis- lative Assembly do not fail to keep on the statute books laws for the assessment and collection of territorial revenues and to elect territorial auditors and treasurers. Nevertheless, for several years no territorial revenues are paid in and the