victualler, or other persons who
received forty dollars for a service at the close of the year 1779,
received, in fact, no more than he who received one dollar for the same
service in the year 1775, or 1776; because in those years the paper
money was at par with silver; whereas, by the close of 1779, forty
paper dollars were worth but one of silver, and would buy no more of the
necessaries of life. To know what the monies emitted by Congress were
worth to the people at the time they received them, we will state the
date and amount of every several emission, the depreciation of paper
money at the time, and the real worth of the emission in silver or gold.

[Illustration: Depreciation of Money 1775-1779, page411]

[* The sum actually voted was 50,000,400, but part of it was
for exchange of old bills, without saying how much. It is
presumed that these exchanges absorbed 25,552,780, because
the remainder 24,447,620, with all the other emissions
preceding September 2nd, 1779, will amount to 159,948,880,
the sum which Congress declared to be then in circulation.]

Thus it appears that the two hundred millions of dollars, emitted by
Congress, were worth to those who received them, but about thirty-six
millions of silver dollars. If we estimate at the same value the like
sum of two hundred millions, supposed to have been emitted by the
States, and reckon the Federal debt, foreign and domestic, at about
forty-three millions, and the State debts at about twenty-five millions,
it will form an amount of one hundred and forty millions of dollars, or
seven hundred and thirty-five millions of livres Tournois, the total
sum which the war has cost the inhabitants of the United States. It
continued eight years, from the battle of Lexington to the cessation
of hostilities in America. The annual expense then was about seventeen
millions and five hundred thousand dollars, while that of our enemies
was a greater number of guineas.

It will be asked, how will the two masses of Continental and of State
money have cost the people of the United States seventy-two millions
of dollars, when they are to be redeemed now with about six millions? I
answer, that the difference, being sixty-six millions, has been lost on
the paper bills separately by the successive holders of them. Every
one through whose hands a bill passed lost on that bill what it lost in
value, during the time it was in his hands. This was a re