llions of dollars. Their indirect assistance was
perhaps as great, though it is impossible today to estimate with any
approach to accuracy the amount either in money or service. Among
obvious items are the collections made by the Sanitary Commission for
the benefit of the hospital service, amounting to twenty-five million
dollars, and about six millions raised by the Christian Commission. In
a hundred other ways both individuals and localities strained their
resources to supplement those of the Government. Immense subscription
lists were circulated to raise funds for the families of soldiers. The
city of Philadelphia alone spent in this way in a single year $600,000.
There is also evidence of a vast amount of unrecorded relief of
needy families by the neighbors, and in the farming districts, such
assistance, particularly in the form of fuel during winter, was very
generally given.

What made possible this enormous total of contributions was, in a word,
the general willingness of those supporting the war to forego luxuries.
They ceased buying a great multitude of unnecessary things. But
what became of the labor that had previously supplied the demand for
luxuries? A part of it went the way of all other Northern labor--into
new trades, into the army, or to the West--and a part continued to
manufacture luxuries: for their market, though curtailed, was not
destroyed. There were, indeed, two populations in the North, and they
were separated by an emotional chasm. Had all the North been a unit in
feeling, the production of articles of luxury might have ceased.
Because of this emotional division of the North, however, this business
survived; for the sacrifice of luxurious expenditure was made by only a
part of the population, even though it was the majority.

Furthermore, the whole matter was adjusted voluntarily without
systematic government direction, since there was nothing in the
financial policy of the Government to correspond to conscription.
Consequently, both in the way of loans and in the way of contributions,
as well as in the matter of unpaid service, the entire burden fell
upon the war party alone. In the absence of anything like economic
conscription, if such a phrase may be used, those Northerners who did
not wish to lend money, or to make financial sacrifice, or to give
unpaid service, were free to pursue their own bent. The election of 1864
showed that they formed a market which amounted to something between s