The Superintendent of Finance set himself seriously to his task. One great obstacle had been removed; one great and decisive step had been made towards the restoration of that sense of security without which industry and enterprise are powerless. As a merchant, he was familiar with the resources of the country; as a Member of Congress, he was familiar with the wants of Government. His resources were taxes and loans; his obligations, an old debt and a daily expenditure. Opposed as he was to the irresponsible currency which had brought the country to the brink of ruin, he was a believer in banks and bills resting on a secure basis. One of his earliest measures was to prepare, with the aid of his Assistant-Superintendent, Gouverneur Morris, a plan of a bank, which soon after, with the sanction of Congress, went into operation as the Bank of North America. Small as the capital with which it started was,--only four hundred thousand dollars,--its influence was immediately felt throughout the country. It gave an impulse to legitimate enterprise which had long been wanting, and a confidence to buyer and seller which they had not felt since the first year of the war. In his public operations the Superintendent used it freely, and, using it at the same time wisely, was enabled to call upon it for aid to the full extent of its ability without impairing its strength. Henceforth the financial history of the Revolution, although it loses none of its importance, loses much of its narrative-interest. No longer a hand-to-hand conflict between coin and paper,--no longer the melancholy spectacle of wise men doing unwise things, and honorable men doing things which, in any other form, they would have been the first to brand with dishonor,--it still continues a long, a wearisome, and often a mortifying struggle: men knowing their duty and refusing to do it, knowing consequences and yet blindly shutting their eyes to them. I will give but one example. After a careful estimate of the operations of 1782, Congress had called upon the States for eight millions. Up to January, 1783, only four hundred and twenty thousand had come into the Treasury. Four hundred thousand Treasury-notes were almost due; the funds in Europe were overdrawn to the amount of five hundred thousand by the sale of drafts. But Morris, waiting only to cover himself by a special authorization of Congress, made fresh sales upon the hopes of the Dutch loan and the possibility of a new French loan, and still held on--as cautiously as he could, but ever boldly and skilfully--his anxious way through the rocks and shoals that menaced him on every side. He was rewarded, as such men too often are, by calumny and suspicion. But when men came to look closely at his acts, comparing his means with his wants, and the expenditure of the Treasury Board with the expenditure of the Finance Office, it was seen and acknowledged that he had saved the country thirteen millions a year in hard money.