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their virtue and integrity.
And the subject is so distinct that, without regard to any particular date of our narrative, we may extend our view of it through the whole period of the war.
The financial system of the Southern Confederacy.
The South was in a condition of complete isolation in the war. The laws of finance were less disturbed by extraneous influences than was ever the case in any country of equal extent, population and civilization before.
The community consisted of several millions of people, occupying a large territory without a specie circulation, and compelled to establish a thoroughly artificial system of finance adapted to the condition of war. The case was anomalous.
Very valuable lessons in finance might be learned from the history of the
Confederate system, if space were allowed to trace its development, step by step, throughout its extraordinary career, and to mark the influence which it exerted upon the social condition, the public and private morals, and the fortunes of the
Confederacy.
It may be said generally that the result of the war was powerfully influenced by the condition of the
Confederate finances, as much so as by any other cause.
It is the most striking peculiarity of modern wars that they are conducted chiefly by means of credit in the form of paper issues.
The system was inaugurated by
Great Britain; and its result is the mammoth debt of the
British government.
The revolutionary governments of
France, as they succeeded each other in the various stages of transition between the autocracy of the Bourbons and the
Empire, copied the
British example, and created enormous debts which shared the fate of the ephemeral powers which incurred them.
All the governments of
Europe, with scarcely an exception, now labour under the burden of obligations incurred in expensive wars.
In proportion with the facility of public credit, has been the magnitude of the scale on which modern wars have been conducted.
And if in
America the people have reason to boast of the stupendous magnitude of the armies which they brought into the field, and of the extent and costliness of their military operations, the marvellous exhibition will be found to have been due, not so much to the boundlessness of their resources, as to the lavish and reckless manner in which they employed a credit never before brought into requisition.
Nor would it be over-stepping the bounds of truth to say, that the war spirit in either section was fed and stimulated, in a very great degree, by the profits which the heavy public expenditures brought to large classes of persons directly responsible for the war, and connected with its operations.
This modern scheme of throwing the burden of debts incurred in war upon the shoulders of posterity has done more to stimulate costly and bloody conflicts between nations and peoples,
