ly the
result of the enormous expenditures occasioned by the Civil War. In
1865, August 31, it reached its highest point $2,381,530,294, with an
annual interest charge of $150,977,697. Since then it has been steadily
reduced until in 1889 the total interest-bearing debt was but
$829,853,990, with an annual interest charge of $33,752,354. The
principal of the national debt is mainly in the form of interest-bearing
bonds held by the National banks and private individuals. These bonds
are of various denominations and are promises of the government to pay
the sums named on their face, at the expiration of a certain period. The
bonds at present unpaid, and as such constituting the major portion of
our national debt, are principally of two kinds; those bearing four and
one-half per cent, annual interest and falling due in 1891, and those
bearing four per cent, interest and falling due in 1907.

The debts of most of the States were contracted by ill-advised and
untimely systems of internal improvements. The total state indebtedness
June I, 1890, as shown by the Eleventh Census, was $238,396,590, a
decrease of slightly over $58,000,000 in ten years. The tendency now
seems to be for States to withdraw from the money market as borrowers,
and for the county and city governments to take their place.

The local debts are very large, and have shown a marked increase during
the last twenty years. They have been for the most part incurred in
improvements and construction of public works, which have in most
instances well repaid the debts incurred.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Money.[1]

No man by himself produces everything he wants to use, but devotes his
time to the production of some few things, and the surplus that he does
not use, he exchanges for other things made by other men. In rude stages
of society this is done by a direct exchange of one commodity for
another, _e.g._ so much wheat or corn for a gun or plow. This is a very
imperfect and cumbersome method, which cannot be employed in our present
complicated transactions of buying and selling. There thus early
developed the use of money, or the practice of referring the value of
all things to one standard, usually the precious metals: so that,
instead of trading 20 bushels of corn for a plow, where it would be
necessary to go to the great trouble of finding a man who had a plow,
and also wanted your corn, you sell it for so much money, and with this
money you buy a plow. Money