ountry. Finally the manufacturers yielded;
they received their compensation in the contract labor law. In 1862
Congress provided for the free distribution of land in 160-acre lots
among men and women of strong arms and willing hearts ready to build
their serried lines of homesteads to the Rockies and beyond.

=Internal Improvements.=--If farmers and manufacturers were early
divided on the matter of free homesteads, the same could hardly be said
of internal improvements. The Western tiller of the soil was as eager
for some easy way of sending his produce to market as the manufacturer
was for the same means to transport his goods to the consumer on the
farm. While the Confederate leaders were writing into their
constitution a clause forbidding all appropriations for internal
improvements, the Republican leaders at Washington were planning such
expenditures from the treasury in the form of public land grants to
railways as would have dazed the authors of the national road bill half
a century earlier.

=Sound Finance--National Banking.=--From Hamilton's day to Lincoln's,
business men in the East had contended for a sound system of national
currency. The experience of the states with paper money, painfully
impressive in the years before the framing of the Constitution, had been
convincing to those who understood the economy of business. The
Constitution, as we have seen, bore the signs of this experience. States
were forbidden to emit bills of credit: paper money, in short. This
provision stood clear in the document; but judicial ingenuity had
circumvented it in the age of Jacksonian Democracy. The states had
enacted and the Supreme Court, after the death of John Marshall, had
sustained laws chartering banking companies and authorizing them to
issue paper money. So the country was beset by the old curse, the banks
of Western and Southern states issuing reams of paper notes to help
borrowers pay their debts.

In dealing with war finances, the Republicans attacked this ancient
evil. By act of Congress in 1864, they authorized a series of national
banks founded on the credit of government bonds and empowered to issue
notes. The next year they stopped all bank paper sent forth under the
authority of the states by means of a prohibitive tax. In this way, by
two measures Congress restored federal control over the monetary system
although it did not reestablish the United States Bank so hated by
Jacksonian Democracy.

=Destruc