LECTURE V.

FINANCES OF THE REVOLUTION.

N the sketches which formed the subject of my

confined myself to general views and statements, without attempting to enter into a full stády of any of the various classes of acts which statesmen are called upon to perform. This evening I propose to give you a fuller view of Congress in action; and in action upon one of the most complex and difficult subjects of legislation. Resistance once resolved on, it became necessary to provide the means of rendering it effective. There were men enough in the country to fill up the army, there was money enough in the country to feed, pay, and clothe them; but how were these men and that money to be reached? We shall see hereafter what was done to bring out the physical resources of the country, and how unwisely it was done. This evening I shall confine myself to a review of the efforts which were made earnestly and persistently, from the beginning of the war to the end of it, to bring out its pecuniary resources.

And here, on the threshold, let me remind you that, in all historical studies, you should still bear in mind the difference between the point of view from which you look at events, and that from which they were seen by the actors themselves. We all act under the influence of ideas. Even those who speak of theories with contempt are none the less the unconscious disciples of some theory, none the less busied in working out some problems of the great theory of life. Much as they fancy that they differ from the speculative man, they differ from him only in contenting themselves with seeing the path as it lies at their feet, while he strives to embrace it all, starting-point and end, in one comprehensive view. And thus in looking back upon the past we are irresistibly led to arrange the events of history, as we arrange the facts of a science, in their appropriate classes and under their respective laws. And thus, too, these events give us the true measure of the intellectual and moral culture of the times, the extent to which just ideas prevailed therein upon all the duties and functions of private and public life. Tried by the standard of absolute truth and right, grievously would they all fall short, and we, too, with them. Judged by the human standard of progressive development and gradual growth, the only standard to which the man of the beam can venture, unrebuked, to bring the man of the mote, we shall find much in them all to sadden us, and much also in which we can sincerely rejoice.

But

In judging, therefore, the political acts of our ancestors, we have a right to bring them to the standard of the political science of their own age, but we have no right to bring them to the higher standard of ours. Montesquieu could give them but an imperfect clew to the labyrinth in which they found themselves involved; and yet no one had seen farther into the mysteries of social and political organization than Montesquieu. Hume had scattered brilliant rays on dark places, and started ideas which, once at work in the mind, would never rest till they had evolved momentous truths and overthrown long-standing errors. no one had yet seen (Adam Smith's great work was just going to the press), that labor was the original source of every form of wealth, that the farmer, the merchant, the manufacturer, were all equally the instruments of national prosperity, or demonstrated as Smith does, that nations grow rich and powerful by giving as they receive, and that the good of one is the good of all. The world had not yet seen that fierce conflict between antagonistic principles which she was soon to see in the French Revolution; nor had political science yet recorded those daring experiments in remoulding society, those constitutions framed in closets, discussed in clubs, accepted and overthrown with equal demonstrations of popular zeal, and which, expressing in their terrible energy the universal dissatisfaction with past and present, the universal

nor a

grasping at a brighter future, have met and answered so many grave questions, questions neither propounded nor solved in any of the two hundred constitutions which Aristotle studied in order to prepare himself for the composition of his “Politics." The world had not yet seen a powerful nation tottering on the brink of anarchy, with all the elements of prosperity in her bosom, bankrupt state sustaining a war that demanded annual millions, and growing daily in wealth and strength, nor the economical phenomena which followed the reopening of Continental commerce in 1814, nor the still more startling phenomena which a few years later attended England's return to specie-payments and a specie-currency, nor statesmen setting themselves gravely down with the map before them to the final settlement of Europe, and, while the ink was yet fresh on their protocols, finding all the results of their combined wisdom set at nought by the inexorable development of the fundamental principle which they had refused to recognize.

But we have seen these things, and, having seen them, unconsciously apply the knowledge derived from them to events to which we have no right to apply it. We condemn errors which we should never have detected without the aid of a light which was hidden from our fathers, and will still be dwelling upon shortcomings which nothing could have avoided but a general diffusion of that

wisdom which Providence never vouchsafes except as a gift to a few exalted minds. Every schoolboy has his text-book of political economy now; but many can remember when these books first made. their appearance in schools; and so late as 1820 the Professor of History in English Cambridge publicly lamented that there was no work upon this vital subject which he could give his classes.

When, therefore, our fathers found themselves face to face with the complex questions of finance, they naturally fell back upon the experience and devices of their past history; they did as in such emergencies men always do, they tried to meet the present difficulty without weighing maturely the future difficulty. The present was at the door, palpable, stern, urgent, relentless; and as they looked at it, they could see nothing beyond half so full of perplexity and danger. They hoped, as in the face of all history and all experience men will ever hope, that out of those depths which their feeble eyes were unable to penetrate, something might yet arise in their hour of need to avert the peril and snatch them from the precipice. Their past history had its lessons of encouragement, some thought, and, some thought, of warning. They seized the example, but the admonition passed by unheeded.

Short as the chronological record of American history then was, that exchange of the products of labor which so speedily grows up into commerce