had thus doubly complicated the financial
situation. The Treasury had disbursed a large amount of demand
notes and received a smaller amount of gold coin than the well
considered estimates of the secretary had anticipated.

The presumption was in favor of our being much stronger in coin
than we were found to be. The discovery of gold in California had
resulted in an enormous product,--surpassing any thing known in
the history of mining. But we had been encouraging the importation
of goods from Europe which were confessedly somewhat cheaper than
our own fabrics, and in amount largely in excess of our export of
cotton and cereals. We were therefore constantly paying the
difference in coin. The political economists who had been in
control of our finances insisted upon treating our gold as an
ordinary product, to be exported in the same manner that we exported
wheat and pork. The consequence was that during the decade preceding
the war our exports of specie and bullion exceeded our imports of
the same by the enormous aggregate of four hundred and fifty millions
of dollars. For that whole period there had been a steady shipment
of our precious metals to Europe at a rate which averaged nearly
four millions of dollars per month.

Advocates of protection had found the drain of our specie the
proximate cause of the financial panic of 1857. They now believed
that the same cause had produced a suspension of coin payment at
a much earlier date than the war pressure alone would have brought
it about. They did not lose the opportunity of demonstrating that
a system of protection which would have manufactured more and
imported less, and which would thus have retained many millions of
our specie at home, would have enabled us to meet the trials of
the war with greater strength and confidence. If the Morrill Tariff
had been enacted four years before, it would have been impossible
for Secretary Cobb to stab the national credit. He would have been
dealing constantly with a surplus instead of a deficit, and could
not have put the nation to shame by forcing it to hawk its paper
in the money markets at the usurious rate of one per cent. a month.
One of the wisest financiers in the United States has expressed
the belief that two hundred millions of coin, which might easily
have been saved to the country by a protective tariff between 1850
and 1860, would have kept the National debt a thousand millions
below the point which it re