e to the success of
the war. It was he who supplied the money which enabled Washington to
complete the great campaign of Trenton and Princeton. In 1781 he was
made superintendent of finance, and by dint of every imaginable device
of hard-pressed ingenuity he contrived to support the brilliant work
which began at the Cowpens and ended at Yorktown. He established the
Bank of North America as an instrument by which government loans might
be negotiated. Sometimes his methods were such as doctors call heroic,
as when he made sudden drafts upon our ministers in Europe after the
manner already described. In every dire emergency he was Washington's
chief reliance, and in his devotion to the common weal he drew upon his
private resources until he became poor; and in later years--for shame be
it said--an ungrateful nation allowed one of its noblest and most
disinterested champions to languish in a debtor's prison. It was of ill
omen for the fortunes of the weak and disorderly Confederation that in
1784, after three years of herculean struggle with impossibilities, this
stout heart and sagacious head could no longer weather the storm. The
task of creating wealth out of nothing had become too arduous and too
thankless to be endured. Robert Morris resigned his place, and it was
taken by a congressional committee of finance, under whose management
the disorders only hurried to a crisis.

[Sidenote: The craze for paper-money, 1786.]

By 1786, under the universal depression and want of confidence, all
trade had well-nigh stopped, and political quackery, with its cheap and
dirty remedies, had full control of the field. In the very face of
miseries so plainly traceable to the deadly paper currency, it may seem
strange that people should now have begun to clamour for a renewal of
the experiment which had worked so much evil. Yet so it was. As starving
men are said to dream of dainty banquets, so now a craze for fictitious
wealth in the shape of paper money ran like an epidemic through the
country. There was a Barmecide feast of economic vagaries; only now it
was the several states that sought to apply the remedy, each in its own
way. And when we have threaded the maze of this rash legislation, we
shall the better understand that clause in our federal constitution
which forbids the making of laws impairing the obligation of contracts.
The events of 1786 impressed upon men's minds more forcibly than ever
the wretched and disorderly conditi