war an able book entitled Ways and Means of Payment, a Full Analysis of the Credit System, were selected. A word of retrospection is here essential to an understanding of the situation.
If it be an axiom in political and social as well as physical and natural science, that the first requisite for progress consists in the correct observation and recording of phenomena, whereby old laws or principles may be verified or extended and new ones discovered, it would be difficult to imagine a field more fruitful for investigation and more promising of reward than the financial and industrial experiences of the United States immediately anterior and subsequent to the outbreak of the civil war—experiences which had truly the character of vast social and political experiments, made on a scale of magnitude rarely if ever before equaled; for the most part emphatically tentative in character, and affecting in their results not only the growth, the income, and the industrial pursuits of the nation directly and immediately concerned, but also in a greater or less degree the trade and commerce of the whole world.
At the breaking out of the civil war in 1861, the United States was in the anomalous position of a great nation practically unencumbered with a national or public debt. Excise, stamp, income, license, and direct or general property taxes under the Federal Government were absolutely unknown; the expenses of a simple and economical administration being defrayed almost entirely by indirect taxes, levied in the form of a tariff on the importation of foreign products or merchandise. In fact, the only other noticeable source of national revenue was from the sale of public lands, which, at a maximum price fixed by law of one dollar and a quarter per acre, returned to the Treasury an average income of from one to three millions of dollars per annum; rising in a few instances, during periods of wild speculation to six, fourteen, and in one exceptional year (1836) to even twenty-four millions of dollars.
The average rate of duties imposed on the aggregate value of foreign importations during the thirty years immediately preceding 1860 was about twenty per cent; but for a portion of the time the annual rate was much less, and for a number of years—1834, to 1843 and 1858 to 1861 inclusive—it was not in excess of fifteen per cent.
But notwithstanding these limitations on the sources and amount of income, the requirements of the national Government for all purposes were so moderate that the receipts of its Treasury continually tended to exceed its disbursements; and the difficulty which most frequently presented itself to its financial administrators, was not the customary one in all other countries, of how to avoid an annual deficit, but rather how to manage to escape an
