THE UNITED STATES.

Southland Times, Issue 707, 9 August 1867, Page 3

THE UNITED STATES.

The correspondent of the " Times," writing from New York on April 9, says : — The financial condition and prospects of the country are a subject which the last Congress seemed to consider too unimportant to require attention. It tried to impose a new tariff upon the . people, which would have raised the prices of all imported goods from 30 to 80 per cent., but, with the exception of this attempt to fill the pockets of interested manufacturers, it put aside economical questions. There were few members who took any interest in them, and still fewer who understood them sufficiently to invite a discussion of their opinions. The new Congress met and adjourned, and left still, unsettled the great problems which the nation must one day meet. Personal disputes, endless attempts to make political capital out of the negro, and measures affecting private or local interests, absorbed both branches of the Legislature to the exclusion of those questions which arc fraught with danger to the Commonwealth. While Congress was sitting no oue could tell whether it would or would not attempt to deal with the finances. Bat now that it is certain nothing can be expected from it, the public is beginning to regard with some anxiety the future prospect. Public writers discuss thetheme with due seriousness and information. A multitude of circumstances compel attention to it. I have often, within the last two years, written to you of the unheard-of prices which are demanded for every necessity of life. Never was the evil so great or so universally felt as at this moment. How people of slender means manage to live I know not, for certain it is that an income which would be large in England will scarcely enable one to pay one's way here. The hotels charge whatever they please. A small house, in an out-of-the-way street, cannot be got under from 3000 dols to 5000 dols a year. A friend of mine recently sold a house which he owned in Fifth Avenue for 165,000 dols. Any one who lias boon in New York will remember the Maison Doree in Union square. The business has lately been broken up, and the house alone, without furniture, sold for neai'ly 300,000 dols. The average charge for two back rooms and board for one person at a respectable hotel — say, on the second floor — is ten dollars a day. It is the same with everything. The effect is that a great dulness has at last settled upon business, and the tradespeople are beginning to quake for their prospects during the summer. And thus the attention of the public is arrested to the course which is being pursued with regard to their finances. It is hard for the people to bring home to their minds the naked fact that they have about 1,500 millions of dollars in circulation, which do not possess any intrinsic value. In the opinion of some writers who are now sifting the subject, the nation cannot sustain a currency of more than five hundred millions. With the currency at its present point, gold ought to be at 200 premium, whereas by constant sales of gold and other operations the Secretary of the Treasury keeps the price varying between 130 and 140. " By this proceeding," says a writer in the Herald, "Mr M'Culloch is destroying the revenue of the Government, prostrating, the industry of the nation, separating capital from labor, throwing whole masses of the laboring population out of employment, and bringing about universal bankruptcy, national and individual." Since the currency cannot be contracted in volume it must be contracted in value, and this is impossible while the Secretary of the Treasury keeps up a fictitious value by sales ot' gold. " There is much more currency out," says the writer just quoted, " than in 1864, amount the production of all things, and when gold went up to 285, which rise was immediately followed by a year of unparalleled prosperity." All the sales of gold which the Secretary can make, it is contended will fail to keep the price up much longer. He ought then to cease selling at once, and buy instead. The national banks should also be instructed to hoard gold. " The whole proceedings of Congress (to make another quotation) and the Secretary may be likened to two steamtugs lashed together by the stern, and pulling in opposite directions. It were ludicrous were it not for the terrible consequences, for the people, in the meantime, are being ground as between the upper and nether millstone."