"The charges made for tuition are about five or six times as high as in 1860. Now, sir, your shoemaker, carpenter, butcher, market man, etc., demand from twenty, to thirty, to forty times as much as in 1860. Will you show me a civilian who is charging only six times the prices charged in 1860, except the teacher only? As to the amassing of fortunes by teachers, spoken of in your article, make your calculations, sir, and you will find that to be almost an absurdity, since they pay from twenty to forty prices for everything used, and are denounced exorbitant and unreasonable in demanding five or six prices for their own labor and skill!"
There were compensations, however. When gold was at 12,000 per cent. premium with us, we had the consolation of knowing that it was in the neighborhood of one hundred above par in New York, and a Richmond paper of September 22, 1864, now before me, fairly chuckles over the high prices prevailing at the North, in a two-line paragraph which says, "Tar is selling in New York at two dollars a pound. It used to cost eighty cents a barrel." That paragraph doubtless made many a five-dollar beefsteak palatable.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] Adapted from Wesley Clair Mitchell, A History of the Greenbacks, Part II, The University of Chicago Press, 1903.
[9] Adapted from A. D. Noyes, Forty Years of American Finance, pp. 7-20. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York and London, 1909.
[10] Ibid., pp. 21-22.
[11] Ibid., pp. 23-31.
[12] Ibid., pp. 44-47.
[13] A. Piatt Andrew, The Essential and the Unessential in Currency Legislation, in Questions of Public Policy, Addresses delivered in the Page Lecture Series, 1913, before the Senior Class of the Sheffield Scientific School, Yale University, pp. 55-59. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut. 1913.
[14] Adapted from George Gary Eggleston, A Rebel's Recollections, pp. 78-107. Hurd and Houghton. Boston, 1875.