Small extravagances helped to swell the total cost of this Assembly to $264,278.06.[110] There were certain items in the general appropriation bill which looked unnecessarily large. When a mere clerk of a district court received a salary of $6,000, and the rental of a building for a state house cost $13,000 for nine months; when the always elastic clause for contingent expenses was stretched to $16,000; when printing and advertising mounted up to $183,000, the people might well begin to question and murmur. A bit of sarcasm was unconsciously incorporated in the printing appropriation of 1870 when a motion to substitute $200,000 for the original $140,000, asking some of these liberal-hearted gentlemen to open their hearts a little wider and take in every official journal of the State, was adopted.[111] The interest alone on bonds issued to railroads is probably accurate enough, but had reached the terrifying sum of $461,014.14. The only spasm of economy which the House suffered during the entire session of 1869 was really a pick at the police, when a few minor officials were struck off or reduced in salary.[112] The law which was to provide the income seemed to bear no relation to the expenditures. Unwisely wasting their time on a bill to enforce collection of taxes already paid to the Confederacy,[113] they rushed the revenue bill through with a haste which explains its inadequacy. Urged by the Committee on Ways and Means to accept its work as complete, even the reading was dispensed with, and the act, which was referred to in a later session as a disgrace,[114] adopted by the House without discussion on the evening of March 3.[115] A clause which provoked the greatest criticism was one licensing gambling-houses, which appeared in the published bill and came up for a perfect storm of debate in the session of 1870. The chairman of the committee stated that it had not been in the original law, and that he believed it had been surreptitiously introduced after it had been acted upon by the House.[116] Moreover, a bill which made no provision for the interest on the debt, which made an appropriation for an institution which did not exist,[117] and which failed to meet the liabilities of the State by $500,000,[118] indicated business financiering which sooner or later must bring the State to bankruptcy.