As I had been elected to the House of Representatives in November, 1862, I resigned my office of commissioner of internal revenue March 3, 1863. Mr. Chase was very unwilling to have me leave, and he endeavored to satisfy me that there was neither illegality nor impropriety in my continuing until the meeting of Congress. I did not agree to his view of the law, and moreover, Congress had so changed the law that the commissioner was required to give bonds. In presence of that requirement I should have left the place. By the same act a cashier was authorized, and thus it happened that when the commissioner was actually in receipt of the moneys the Government had no security and yet security was required when he was deprived of the power to touch one cent of the receipts. I remained at Washington from March 3 to August, engaged in the preparation of a work upon the Revenue System. This volume contains the rulings and decisions by me most of which have been sustained by the courts or justified by experience.* My successor was Joseph J. Lewis, a country lawyer from Pennsylvania. He had written a biography of Mr. Lincoln, and he had been the President's choice at the outset. When I resigned, the President had his way. Whether Mr. Chase presented any other person I cannot say. Mr. Lewis had no idea of the work of administration. When questions were submitted to the office, he proceeded to prepare an answer which he wrote with a quill pen in his own hand. At the beginning he sent off his answers without the knowledge of the chiefs of division, and in some instances a newspaper report was the first information that the subordinates obtained that a decision had been made. In some instances he passed upon old questions, without any inquiry or examination, until it was discovered that the head of a division was ruling one way and Mr. Lewis was ruling another way at the same time. When I left the office in March, 1863, Mr. Chase said to me that it exceeded in magnitude the entire Treasury Department, March 1861. It was in fact the largest Government department ever organized in historical times, and it was organized without a precedent. By its machinery, it became finally so vast, that three hundred and fifty million dollars were assessed and collected in a single year. In the thirty-eight years of its existence, the gross collections have amounted to $5,524,363,255.89. It has existed eight and thirty years with no other changes than such as have been required by the change of laws. The frame work, including the system of bookkeeping with its checks and tests, remains.