In the report of the Secretary of the Treasury submitted to Congress at the commencement of the present session it is estimated that after exhausting all the probable resources of the year there will remain a deficit of about $14,000,000. With a view partly to a permanent system of revenue and partly to immediate relief from actual embarrassment, that officer recommended, together with a plan for establishing a Government exchequer, some expedients of a more temporary character, viz, the issuing of Treasury notes and the extension of the time for which the loan authorized to be negotiated by the act of the last session should be taken. Congress accordingly provided for an issue of Treasury notes to the amount of $5,000,000, but subject to the condition that they should not be paid away below par. No measure connected with the last of the two objects above mentioned was introduced until recently into the House of Representatives. Should the loan bill now pending before that body pass into a law for its present amount, there would still remain a deficit of $2,500,000. It requires no argument to show that such a condition of the Treasury is incompatible not only with a high state of public credit, but with anything approaching to efficiency in the conduct of public affairs. It must be obvious even to the most inexperienced minds that, to say nothing of any particular exigency, actual or imminent, there should be at all times in the Treasury of a great nation, with a view to contingencies of ordinary occurrence, a surplus at least equal in amount to the above deficiency. But that deficiency, serious as it would be in itself, will, I am compelled to say, rather be increased than diminished without the adoption of measures adequate to correct the evil at once. The stagnation of trade and business, in some degree incident to the derangement of the national finances and the state of the revenue laws, holds out but little prospect of relief, in the ordinary course of things, for some time to come.