The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 4, October, 1863

The letter addressed by Secretary Chase, of the Treasury Department, to the chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means of the House of Representatives, and to the chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, under date June 7th, 1862, suggested the power by Congress to the treasury to issue $150,000,000 in treasury notes, in addition to this sum, authorized by the act of February 25th, 1862; also, authority to receive fifty millions of dollars on deposit, in addition to fifty millions previously authorized by Congress. These suggestions were favorably considered in both Houses, and the recommendations of the Secretary were adopted fully, leading to the adoption of a national system of finance, which will eventually reëstablish and preserve national credit. Fears have been expressed in some quarters that this increased volume of paper money would be a public evil, and serve to disturb the value of property and the price of labor. This might be reasonably anticipated if the country were at peace, and the Government expenditures were upon a peace footing.

But a state of things exists now in this country hitherto unknown. The contracts of the Government involve the expenditure of larger sums than were ever paid before in the same space of time by this or any other Government. In the disbursements of these large sums it is an obvious duty of Congress to provide a national circulation of uniform value throughout the whole country—a circulation of a perfectly reliable character, not subject in the least to the ordinary vicissitudes of trade or to the revulsions which have frequently marked our history. These revulsions have been witnessed, and their results seen by the leading public men of the century. Mr. Madison saw at an early day the importance of creating and sustaining a government circulation. His language was: 'It is essential to every modification of the finances that the benefits of an uniform national currency should be restored to the community.'

Mr. Calhoun, in 1816, said: 'By a sort of undercurrent, the power of Congress to regulate the money of the country has caved in, and upon its ruin have sprung up those institutions which now exercise the right of making money in and for the United States.'

'It is the duty of government,' says a well known writer, 'to interfere to regulate every business or pursuit that might otherwise become publicly injurious. On this principle it interferes to prevent the circulation of spurious coin.' Counterfeit coin is more readily detected than a fictitious paper currency, yet no sane man would advocate the repeal of the laws which prohibit it. Why, then, permit the unlimited manufacture of paper money of an unreliable character?

In the consideration of this subject we should divest ourselves of all selfish views of private profit and advantage. We should look only to the public good, to stability in trade and commerce, and to the general interests of the people at large as distinguished from those of a few individuals. It is clearly then the province of government to establish and to regulate the paper money of the nation, so that it shall possess the following attributes:

I. To be uniform in value throughout all portions of the country.

II. To be perfectly reliable at all times as a medium for the payment of debts.

III. To be issued in limited amounts, and under the control of the Government only.

IV. To be convertible, at the pleasure of the holder, into gold or silver.

It must be conceded that these requisites do not belong, and never can belong, to paper issued by joint stock banks, which are governed with a view to the largest profit, and which are but little known beyond their own immediate localities.

Recent history assures us that abuses have been practised in reference to the bank circulation of the country, which have led to violent revulsions and severe loss. England experienced the same results between the years 1790 and 1840, and to such an extent that in the year 1844 her statesmen devised a system whereby no further expansion of paper money should occur. The amount then existing was assumed to be a minimum of the amount required for commercial transactions, and it was ordered that all bank issues beyond that sum shall be represented by a deposit of gold.

If the Bank of England had been governed by considerations of public welfare, and not by those of private interest, it would not have reduced the rate of interest to 2-1/2 per cent. in 1844-'5, thus producing violent speculation, and leading to the revulsion of 1849. Nor would the bank have established low rates of interest only in the year 1857, thus leading this powerful institution to the verge of bankruptcy, and to the clemency of the British Cabinet in November of that year.

England has checked the paper circulation of the country, but has not withdrawn from the bank the power to promote speculation by extravagant loans at a low rate of discount.

The Governments of France and England have both assumed control of the paper currency of their respective countries. This is sound policy, and it is one of the prerogatives that must be exercised, in its full force, by the Government of the United States and by all other governments, if stability, permanency, consistency are to be observed or maintained for the people. This is obviously necessary in a time of peace and prosperity; it is perhaps more so in a time of rebellion or war, like the present. Circumstances may arise where it will be the course of wisdom and safety to suspend specie payment; and, in some extreme exigencies, to forbid the export of specie.

This position was well explained by Mr. J.W. Gilbart, manager of the London and Westminster Bank, who, in his testimony before Sir Robert Peel, in 1843, said, 'If I were prime minister, I would immediately, on the commencement of war, issue an order in council for the bank to stop payment. I stated also that I spoke as a politician, not as a banker. * * * I came to the conclusion that, under the circumstances of the war of 1797, a suspension of cash payments was not a matter of choice, but of necessity.' (Vide 'History of the Bank of England,' New York edition, p. 130.)

We come now to consider what is necessary, in order to restore the currency of the United States to a specie footing. This restoration is demanded alike by motives of justice and sound policy. No contracts can be well entered into, unless the currency of the country is upon a substantial and permanent footing of redemption. It is a matter which concerns every individual in the community; it is especially so to the General Government in view of its extraordinary expenditures: and no commercial prosperity can be maintained without it.

A restoration of public and private credit can be accomplished only by an observance of those sound principles of finance that have been announced by the wise men of our own and other countries. Mr. Alexander Hamilton, Mr. Gallatin, Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Madison, each in his turn advocated a national institution, by which the currency of the country could be placed upon a reliable and permanent footing. Such an institution should control the currency and receive surplus capital on deposit; but need not interfere with the legitimate operations of the State banks as borrowers and lenders of money, nor encourage in the slightest degree, through loans, any speculative movements among the people.

In the next place our people must resort to and maintain more economy in their individual expenditure, and thus preserve a balance of foreign trade in our own favor. It is shown that, during the fiscal year ending 30 June, 1860, there were imported into the United States goods, wholly manufactured, of the value of … $166,073,000, partially manufactured, 62,720,000.

We can dispense with two thirds of such articles during our present national reverses, and rely upon our own domestic labor for similar products, viz.:

besides other articles exceeding one hundred millions in value.

Rather than send abroad thirty or forty millions in gold annually, as we have done of late years, let us dispense with foreign woollen goods, silk and cotton goods, laces, &c., and encourage our own mills, at least until the war and its debt are over.

Mr. Madison said much in a few words, when he said:

'The theory of 'let us alone' supposes that all nations concur in a perfect freedom of commercial intercourse. Were this the case, they would, in a commercial view, be but one nation, as much as the several districts composing a particular nation; and the theory would be as applicable to the former as the latter. But this golden age of free trade has not yet arrived, nor is there a single nation that has set the example. No nation can, indeed, safely do so, until a reciprocity, at least, be insured to it. * * A nation, leaving its foreign trade, in all cases, to regulate itself, might soon find it regulated by other nations into subserviency to a foreign interest.'

There is much good sense, too, in the views promulgated by another president, who said, in relation to our independence of other nations:

'The tariff bill before us, embraces the design of fostering, protecting, and preserving within ourselves the means of national defence and independence, particularly in a state of war. * * * The experience of the late war (1812) taught us a lesson, and one never to be forgotten. If our liberty and republican form of government, procured for us by our Revolutionary fathers, are worth the blood and treasure at which they were obtained, it surely is our duty to protect and defend them. * * * What is the real situation of the agriculturist? Where has the American farmer a market for his surplus product? Except for cotton, he has neither a foreign nor home market. Does not this clearly prove, when there is no market either at home or abroad, that there is too much labor employed in agriculture, and that the channels of labor should be multiplied? Common sense points out the remedy. Draw from agriculture the superabundant labor; employ it in mechanism and manufactures; thereby creating a home-market for your bread-stuffs, and distributing labor to the most profitable account and benefits to the country. Take from agriculture in the United States six hundred thousand men, women and children, and you will at once give a home-market for more bread-stuffs than all Europe now furnishes us. In short, sir, we have been too long subject to the policy of British merchants. It is time that we should become a little more Americanized; and, instead of feeding the paupers and laborers of England, feed our own; or else, in a short time, by continuing our present policy, we shall be rendered paupers ourselves.'

 

Mr. Bigelow, in his late and highly valuable work on the tariff, says truly (p. 103):

'Can any one question that our home production far outweighs in importance all other material interests of the nation? * * * It is the nation of great internal resources, of vigorous productive power and self-dependent strength, which is always best prepared and most able, not only to defend itself, but to lend others a helping hand.'

If our people would maintain their own national integrity, their own individual independence, and their true status in the great family of nations of the earth, they will [at least until the present rebellion is crushed, and until the public debt thereby created shall be extinguished] pursue a strict course of public and private economy. Let us encourage and support our own manufactures, and thereby contribute to the subsistence and wealth of our own laborers instead of contributing millions annually to the pauper labor of European nations; especially of those nations that have failed to give us countenance in the present struggle and that have, on the contrary, given both direct and indirect aid to the rebels of the South.

The United States have within themselves, in great abundance, contributed by a bountiful Providence, the leading products of the earth. In metals and in agricultural products, we exceed any and all other countries of the earth. If we encourage the labor of our own people in the development of the great resources of the country, we shall not only preserve our own commercial independence, but we shall soon be, as we ought to be in view of such advantages, the creditor nation of the world, and compel other countries to resort to us for the raw materials for their own manufacturing districts.

With the aid of the vast iron and coal mines of our own country, we can construct and keep in force an adequate navy for peace or for war. Our skilled industry can produce firearms equal to any in the world. The vast agricultural resources of the West yield abundance for ourselves and a large surplus for other countries. The breadstuffs of the West and Northwest; the tobacco of the Middle States, and the cotton of the South are in demand, throughout nearly all Europe. Let us then be independent ourselves of foreign manufacturers, and endeavor to place the rest of the world under obligations to our own country for the necessaries of life. This will do more to preserve peace than all the arguments of cabinets or the combined navies and armies of the world.

Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell said,⁷ in parliament, in 1842, five years before the famine in Ireland: 'We are not, we cannot be, independent of foreign nations, any more than they can of us: * * * two millions of our people have been dependent on foreign countries for their daily food. At least five millions of our people are dependent on the supplies of cotton from America, of foreign wool or foreign silk. * * * The true independence of a great commercial nation is to be found, not in raising all the produce it requires within its own bound, but in attaining such a preëminence in commerce that the time can never arise when other nations will not be compelled, for their own sales, to minister to its wants.'

Now this principle, enunciated twenty years ago by men, who now hold the reins of the English Government, is especially one for us to bear in mind. While England, from her limited surface, can never be independent of other countries for the supply of food, we may say, and we can demonstrate, that the United States can reach that preëminence to which the great English statesman alluded—a preëminence which he would gladly attain for his own countrymen.

To the General Government was confided by the framers of the Constitution the power to 'coin money, and regulate the value thereof;' and the States were forbidden to 'emit bills of credit;' from which we may infer that it was intended to place the control of the currency in the hands of the General Government. It will be generally conceded that it would be wiser to have one central point of issue than several hundred as at present. There should be but one form for, and one source of, the currency. It should emanate from a source where the power cannot be abused, and where the interests of the people at large, and not of individuals, will be consulted.

The people have thus an interest at stake. It is for their benefit that a national circulation, of a perfectly reliable character, should be established. The remark made by Sir Robert Peel, in parliament, in May, 1844, at the time of the recharter of the bank, applies with equal force to the national currency of this or any other country.

'There is no contract, public or private, national or individual, which is unaffected by it. The enterprises of trade—the arrangements made in all the domestic relations of society—the wages of labor—pecuniary transactions of the highest amount and the lowest—the payment of the national debt—the provision for the national expenditure—the command which the coin of the lowest denomination has over the necessaries of life—are all affected by the decision to which we may come.'

Sir Robert Peel wisely comprehended the powers and attributes of a national currency, and we may wisely adopt his idea that such a national currency, controlled by the national legislature, for the use and benefit of the people, is the only one that can be safely adopted.

The national banking system established by Congress, in the year 1863, at the suggestion of Secretary Chase, of the Treasury Department, is the initiatory step toward a highly desirable reform in the paper currency of the country. Already over seventy national banks have been organized, under the act of Congress, with a combined capital of ten millions of dollars, whose circulation will have not only a uniform appearance, but a uniform value throughout the whole country. Numerous others are in process of organization. To the community at large the new system is desirable, because it secures to the people a currency of uniform value and perfect reliability. The notes of these institutions will be at par in every State in the Union, and holders may rely upon the certainty of redemption upon demand: whether the institution be solvent or not—in existence or not—the Government holds adequate security for instant redemption of all notes issued under the law.

This feature of the paper currency of the country is one that has long been needed. For the want of it the States have been for many years crowded with a currency of unequal market value, and of doubtful security. Added to this is a marked feature of the new system which did not pertain to the Bank of the United States in its best days. Its workings are free from individual favoritism. No loans are granted to political or personal friends, at the risk of the Government, and all temptation to needless and hurtful expansion is thus destroyed. There is no mammoth institution, under the control of one or a few individuals, liable at times to be prostituted to political and personal ends of an objectionable character. While the banks under the new system are spread over a large space, they perform what is needed of the best managed institutions; and although perfectly independent of each other in their liabilities, expenses, losses, and in their action generally, yet together they form a practical unit, and will be serviceable in counteracting that tendency to inflation and speculation which has marked many years in the commercial history of this country.

We consider the Bank Act of 1863 as one of the most important features of the Thirty-seventh Congress, and of this Administration. It will create a link long wanted between the States and Territories, and do much to strengthen the Union and maintain commercial prosperity. The country will hereafter honor Secretary Chase for the conception and success of this scheme, even if there were no other distinguished traits in his administration of the Treasury and the Government finances.

OCTOBER AFTERNOON IN THE HIGHLANDS

 
Slowly toward the western mountains
    Sinks the gold October sun;
Longer grow the deepening shadows,
    And the day is nearly done.
Rosy gleams the quiet River
    'Neath the crimson-tinted sky;
White-winged vessels, wind-forsaken,
    On the waveless waters lie.
Glow the autumn-tinted valleys,
    On the hills soft shadows rest,
Growing warmer, purple glowing,
    As the sun sinks toward the west.
Slanting sunlight through the Cedars,
    Scarlet Maples all aglow,
Long rays streaming through the forests,
    Gleam the dead leaves lying low.
Golden sunshine on the cornfields,
    Glittering ripples on the stream.
And the still pools in the meadows
    Catch the soft October gleam.
Warmer grows the purple mountains,
    Lower sinks the glowing sun,
Soon will fade the streaming sunlight—
    See, the day is nearly done!
 

THE ISLE OF SPRINGS

CHAPTER III

THE COUNTRY

After having been detained in town several days longer than I had reckoned on, by heavy rains, which ran through the streets in rivers, and filled the bed of Sandy Gully, through which we must pass, with a rushing torrent of irresistible strength, a small party of us left Kingston one morning for the mountains of St. Andrew and Metcalfe, among which lie the stations of the American missionaries whom we had come to join. We were mounted on the small horses of the country, whose first appearance excited some doubts in the mind of a friend whether he was to carry the horse or the horse him. However, they are not quite ponies, and their blood is more noble than their size, being a good deal of it Arab. They are decidedly preferable for mountain travel to larger animals.

We directed our course over the hot plains towards the mountains which rose invitingly before us, ready to receive us into their green depths. On leaving the town, we passed first through sandy lanes bordered by cactus hedges, rising in columnar rows, and then came out upon the excellent macadamized road over which thirteen of the sixteen miles of our journey lay. As we went along we met a continual succession of groups of the country people, mostly women and children, coming into Kingston with their weekly load of provisions to sell. They eyed us with expressions varying from good-natured cordiality to sullenness, and occasionally we heard a rude remark at the expense of the 'Buckras;' but for the most part their demeanor was civil and pleasant. Most of them had the headloads without which a negro woman seems hardly complete in the road, varying in dimensions from a huge basket of yams or bananas to an ounce vial. How such a slight thing manages to keep its perpendicular with their careless, swinging gait, is something marvellous, but they manage it to perfection. Almost every group, in addition, had a well-laden donkey—comical little creatures, looking hardly bigger under their huge hampers than well-sized Newfoundland dogs, and hurrying nimbly along, with a speed that betokened a wholesome remembrance of a good many hard thrashings in the past and a reasonable dread of similar ones in the future. If I held the doctrine of transmigration, I should be firmly persuaded that the souls of parish beadles, drunken captains, and other petty tyrants, shifted quarters into the bodies of Jamaica negroes' donkeys. One patriotic black woman, whose donkey was rather refractory, relieved her mind by exclaiming, in a tone of infinite disgust, 'O-h-h you Roo-shan!' accompanying her objurgation by several emphatic demonstrations on his hide of how she was disposed to treat a 'Rooshan' at that present moment.⁸

Going on, we passed several beautiful 'pens,' as farms devoted to grazing are called. These near town are little more than mere pieces of land surrounding elegant villas, the residence of wealthy gentlemen whose business lies in Kingston. Here you see 'the one-storied house of the tropics, with its green jalousies and deep veranda,' surrounded by handsomely kept meadows of the succulent Guinea grass, which clothes so large a part of the island with its golden green, and enclosed by wire fences or by the intricate but delicate logwood hedges, or else by stone walls. On either side of the carriage road which swept round before the most elegant of these villas, that of Mr. Porteous, we noticed rows of the mystic century plant.

At last we left the comparatively arid plain, with its scantier vegetation, and began to ascend Stony Hill, which is 1,360 feet high where the road passes over it. The cool air passing through the gap, and our increasing elevation, now began to temper the heat, and soon the clouds began to gather again, and a slight rain fell. But I did not notice it, for every step of the journey now seemed to bring me farther into the heart of fairyland. It was not any variety of colors, but the unutterable depth of green, enclosing us, as we ascended, more and more completely in its boundless exuberance. From that moment the richest verdure of my native country has seemed pale and poor. Reaching the top of the hill, we saw above us the higher range, looking down on us through the shifting mists, with that inexpressible gracefulness which tempers the grandeur of tropical mountains.

We descended the hill on the other side into a small inland valley, containing the two estates of Golden Spring and Temple Hall. The former, which presented nothing very noticeable then, has since passed under the management of a gentleman who to a judicious and energetic personal oversight has added a kindliness and strict honesty in his dealings with the laborers much more desirable than frequent in the island. As a result of this, Golden Spring has become a garden. A great many more dilapidated estates would become gardens under the same efficacious mode of treatment.

The streams were so swollen by the rain that on coming to what is commonly a trifling rivulet, we found it so high as to cost us some trouble to cross. However, we all got over, although one servant boy with his pack horse was caught by the current and carried down several rods almost into the river, which was rushing by in a turbid torrent. I ought to have been much alarmed, but having a happy way, in new circumstances, of taking it for granted that everything which happens is just what ought to happen then and there, I stood composedly on the farther bank, nothing doubting that the boy and the beast had their own good reasons for striking out a new track, and it was not till they were both safe on land that I learned with some consternation that they had come within an inch of being drowned.

At length we turned aside into a byroad leading up a steep hill, slippery with mud, and left this pleasant valley. I passed through it many a time afterwards, and never lost the impression of its peaceful richness.

We now found ourselves in the wild country in which our missionary stations lie. Hills rose around on every side; their surfaces broken and furrowed into every fantastic variety of shape, with only distance enough between their bases for the mountain streams to flow. In our latitude such a country would be much of the time a bleak desolation. But here the mantle of glorious and everlasting green softens and enriches the broken and fluctuating surfaces into luxuriant and cloying beauty. In such an ocean of verdure we now found ourselves, its emerald waves rolling above, below, and around us. Our road, when once we had surmounted the short hill, was a narrow, winding bridle path, which kept along almost upon a level over a continual succession of natural causeways, spanning the gullies with such an appearance of art as I have never seen elsewhere. I afterward learned that these are dikes of trap, from which the softer rock has been gradually disintegrated, leaving them thus happily arranged for human convenience.

After three miles' travel over these roads of nature's making, in a rain which at last became quite uncomfortable, we came finally to Oberlin Mission House. A West Indian country house, without fire or carpets, must be very pleasingly fitted up not to look dreary in a wet day, and Oberlin House appeared rather cheerless as we alighted with streaming garments, the romance pretty well soaked out of us for the time. But after supper and a change of clothes, and the clearing away of the clouds, our dismal spirits cleared up too, and we went out into the garden to enjoy the rare flowers and plants—the crimson-leaved ponsetto, the Bleeding Heart, with its ensanguined centre, the curiously pied and twisted Croton Pictum, the Plumbago, well named from the leaden hue of its flowers, the long, deep-red leaves of the Dragon's Blood, the purple magnificence of the Passion flower, relieved by the more familiar beauty of the Four o'clock and of the Martinique rose. Seeing something that pleased me, I stepped forward to view it more narrowly, when a sudden access of acute pain in one foot, quickly spreading to the knee, admonished me that I had got into mischief in the shape of an ant's nest, and gave me the first instalment of a lesson I learned in due time very thoroughly, that the beauties of Jamaica are to be enjoyed with a very cautious regard to the paramount rights of the insect creation.

When I went to bed, I found the bedclothes saturated with dampness. But I learned that it was like a Newport fog, too saline to be mischievous. The atmosphere of the island, even in the brightest and most elastic weather, is so impregnated with moisture, that a Leyden jar will lose its charge in being taken across the room, and an electrical machine will not work without a pan of coals under the cylinder. But as no part of the island is more than twenty-five miles from the sea, this continual moisture appears to be quite innocuous, its worst effect being the musty smell which it causes in everything in the mountains, where there is the most rain. Use fortunately takes from us the perception of this, or it would be quite intolerable. Perpetual summer, and the utmost glory of earth, sky, and sea, are not to be enjoyed without drawbacks that would make a careful housekeeper very doubtful about the desirableness of the exchange. And so ended my first day in the country.