All public expenses were defrayed and all salaries were paid in the products of labor. The salary of a judge, for instance, amounting to twelve hundred dollars per annum, neither more nor less than a Co-opolitan received as his annual dividend, was paid by the state in orders or credit checks for goods or whatever the Co-opolitan Association had to sell. Such orders were of various denominations and in the following form: To the Co-opolitan Association: Deliver to the bearer hereof goods, wares, merchandise, entertainment or services of the value of one dollar and charge the same to the State of Idaho. Jacob Wirth, John Thompson, Secretary. Governor. This method of collecting taxes and paying state expenses proved fully equal to the emergency. The Co-opolitan Association lost nothing by it. All schedule prices were fixed, as I have already stated, at a figure which was slightly lower than the cash market price for non-perishable and staple products and still lower for produce generally considered perishable. But the producer also found his advantage to consist in the facility with which it enabled him to meet his public dues at all times promptly, thus avoiding penalties, interest and expenses. The system had not been long in operation before a question arose, concerning these orders, with the Federal authorities, who, at first, pronounced the Co-opolitan Association a kind of a banking institution, and the state orders upon it devices in the nature of state-bank issues. The effort was then made to compel the Co-opolitan Association to pay the ten per cent tax imposed by the Federal law on such issues. The question was never brought into the courts, because the most eminent and expert lawyers in the Union agreed that such orders could no more be regarded as money than the checks of business men upon their bank deposits, the promissory notes of debtors, the tickets of transportation companies and the time checks of mining and other large corporations controlling labor.