Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/160

148 inconvenient but inevitable surplus. And it is a curious fact, and one perhaps altogether unprecedented and almost unrecognized in history, that from the years 1837 to 1857 there was rarely a single fiscal year, in which the unexpended balance in the national Treasury—derived from a few sources—at the end of the year, was not in excess of one half of the total expenditure of the preceding year.

To provide for the use, or rather to get rid of a continual surplus, various plans were from time to time suggested. In one instance the House of Representatives, on motion of Henry Clay (the leading statesman of his day), seriously considered the question of the expediency of the national Government becoming by purchase and investment a partner in various stock corporations or enterprises; and pending any conclusion the surplus funds were deposited in the local or small State banks, with reiterated injunctions "to loan liberally to merchants."

In 1836, the unexpended cash balance in the Treasury of the United States reported as available for public purposes, being $65,723,959—$46,001,467 of which was on deposit in ninety-one different State banks—Congress (by act of June 23d of that year) appropriated the sum of $37,468,859 for distribution among the States; of which $27,063,430 was officially certified in September, 1837, as having been actually paid. Most of the States applied the amount apportioned to them for educational purposes. Others used it differently and less wisely: Massachusetts, for example, dividing her share proportionally among her towns and cities, where it was expended at the discretion of the local authorities; in one instance, in a small fishing town, for the construction of walks on the sands for the benefit of pedestrians; and in others for the purchase of houses and lands for the use and settlement of the town's poor.

As might have been expected under such circumstances, fiscal and economic subjects were during the period under consideration, those that least of all attracted the attention of the American people. Few books or essays on such topics were either written or read, while the continually increasing agitation and interest respecting the existence or extension of negro slavery furnished