The Sun.
London, England, 1862-06-03 00:00:00

the notes with which everyone must be familiar who
has travelled in Austria. Some of these spoils of
war have lately been sold in the city fo sums very
far in excess of their nominal value, doubtless to be
transferred to the scrap-books or albums of ladies
or other collectors, and preserved as mementoes of
the war.

The South, unlike the North, has been in great
distress for want of paper. The North may have
lacked gold and silver to pay its war expenses, but
its supply of paper and ink have been all but un-
limited, and the production of creditable looking
bank and government notes have never stopped
for deficiency of the raw material. It has not been
so in the South. Paper of the most inferior kind
has been used for the purpose, and in some instances
old cardboard and bandboxes, and even the blank
halves of old letters have been pressed into the ser-
vice. The New York journals have, for some days
past, been making exceedingly merry over these
Southern " shin-plasters." If you ask an American
familiar with current slang what a " shin plaster',
is, he will tell you that it is an inconvertible note
—a small accommodation bill, or a promise to pay,
not representing any legitimate mercantile trans-
action, or representable by the smallest quantity of
the precious metals, or by any other article of real
and tangible property. If you ask him whether
there are no shin• plasters in the North, he will re-
ply in the negative. If you urge that the Federal
Government has issued 156 millions of paper dol-
lars, based entirely upon its credit, and not repre-
sented by gold or silver, and ask whether these 150
millions of paper deserve any other name, he will
reply that he cannot see it—that if you possess
one of these bills for five dollars, the lowest figure
yet issued, you can buy anything that its nominal
value will cover just as readily as with a piece of
gold ; that the people have confidence in the Go-
vernment; that they are likely to continue to have
confidence in it ; and that as long as such confidence
lasts there is no necessity to have gold or silver in

reserve to represent any amount of notes that the
Government may please to issue. He does not see
that in the North as well as in the South this ques-
tion of confidence is one on which a Government
as well as the people may deceive itself, and the
confidence which he himself feels in his Government
to-day might be destroyed or very much weakened
to-morrow, if a series of reverses were to befall its
arms, such as the defeat of M'Clellan at Richmond,
the recapture of New Orleans or the annihilation of
the great army ofthe South-West by the force under
Beauregard, He sees the mote in the Southern eye,
but not the beam in the eye of the North, and
thinks that nothing can be clearer than the fact
that the South will be ruined by its over-issues
of paper money, if from no other cause. All the
journals of New York appear to be of the same
opinion, and one of them has just published an
elaborate article to prove the awful nature of the
financial error into which the South has fallen.
"The whole rebel currency," it asserts—
" Has been from the start the most stupendous
swindle that the world has ever beheld. It falls
dead upon the hands of every man who holds it,
and 300,000,000 dols. of loss cannot be so distributed
in any community as not to impoverish thousands
by the explosion. What other generations suffered
from Continental notes and assignats the South
must suffer with far greater severity than this uni-
versal collapse. It is only upon the return of peace
that such explosions culminate. While the war
lasts a pervading pressure serves to brace up all
hopes and interests ; but this pressure relaxes with
the return of peace, and the vast artificial system
which the war compelled collapses into a desolating
chaos. This generation will soon witness a spec-
tacle in the rebel States such as history but faintly
pictures as having succeeded the American revolu-
tion, the overthrow of Napoleon, or the close of our
second war with England."
This is all very true; but does not the argument
apply to the North as well as to the South ? And
if the Northern Government continues to incur
enormous debt, and to flood the land with paper
money, may there not be a collapse in New York as
well as in New Orleans ? And if, in the above
extract the word " federal" were substituted for
" rebel," would not the warning read equally well,
and be quite as much needed ?

Efforts are constantly made to hide from the
public the real magnitude of the debt that has
already been incurred, and to exaggerate, at the
same time, the taxpaying powers of the community
—powers that are too exclusively based upon the
wealth of New York, Boston and Philadelphia, and
not calculated on the productive resources of the
agricultural and manufacturing community, scat-
tered over the great West and North. Should peace
between the belligerents be established before the
4th of July, which is, as I have already remarked,
the favourite date now fixed by sanguine patriots
for the end of the war, the public debt will amount
to 1,250,000,000, borrowed at various times, and for
various periods, at 4,5, 6, and 7 per cent. If the war
lasts until the summer of 1863, which is highly pro-
bable, from the desperate tenacity and hatred of the
one side, and from the equally desperate pride of the
other, it will amount to double that sum, or, in
round numbers, £500,000,000 sterling. "We are
so great a people," says one journal, in grim jest,
"that we can incur in two years as big 9. debt as
poor little England can incur in a hundred." The
all-important question that Northern Americans
should ask themselves with respect to the " big
debt" is, '," Will the credit of the Federal Govern-
ment, separated from or in renewed union with the
South, be sufficient to provide regularly for the
payment of the interest ?" If the debt be consoli-
dated at 5 per cent. the annual burden fixed upon
th© labour and trade of the country by two years of
civil and fruitless warfare will amount to
£25,000,000 sterling. And whether the South
succeed or fail in establishing its independence, the
current annual expenses of the Federal Govern-
ment will certainly, on the most moderate calcula-
tion, amount to £25,000,000 more, or £50,000,000
sterling, for past war and present safety.
Whether it be compelled to keep the South
in military subjection, or to hold its own against
the encroachments or hostility of a rival Republic,
it will be forced to maintain a large army and a
powerful navy. Before the outbreak of the war, the
Federal Government was a mere shadow. It had
little authority and few expenses, and such expenses
as it had were more than provided for by Customs
duties and the sale of the national domain. But,
winning or losing, the Federal Government must
cease to be a shadow, and become a reality. It has
levied large armies, fitted out magnificent fleets, and
gained great victories upon credit, and at the pre-
sent moment the Northern people are willing to
give it credit for any amount it pleases, so gratified
are they with its warlike achievements. No one
seems to remember or to care that although the war
has lasted upwards of a year the Federal Govern-
\ rnent has not hitherto paid a single penny to sup-
port it except in paper, or that the Tax Bill, which
intendedis to provide means for meeting their great
liabilities,
has not yet passed into law, and threatens
to be inoperative if it ever shall receive the Presi-
dential sanction. Surely, in face of the
circum-
stances, the South is not fairly
chargeable
with a
monopoly of"shin-plasters? "
There has been no
depreciation in the value of
the paper which the Federal Government has
issued, and which it is still engaged in printing as I
fast as a steam-engine can work, but there has
been a vary general rise of the price of food and of I
all the necessaries of life in the great cities, as well
as a very general interruption to trade, which
has thrown vast numbers of people out of Employ-
j
went, sent the youngest and most vigorous of them
to the war, left the old and infirm to poverty or
pauperism.

It used to be the boast of America that there were
no beggars in their streets, and that pauperism, the
chronic disease of the Old World, had not been
inoculated upon the New. The boast is no longer
founded upon fact. There are as many beggars in
New York in Proportion to its population as there
are in London, and pauperism, the spawn of the
war, has fastened itself
upon the body politic. Bet
plentiful what signifies ? Money is for speculation,
if not for trade. The largest and most valuable
coin to be seen is the 50-cent, piece, worth a little
more than 2s. English ; and that is only obtainable
in change for the smaller purohaa es
...at can be
made with a dollar. The gold is all in the banks,