The public printing was another field for their robbery. The total cost of the printing in South Carolina for the eight years of Republican domination, 1868-76, was $1,326,589. The total cost for printing for 78 years previous—from 1790 to 1868—was $609,000, showing an excess for the cost of printing in eight years, over 78 years previous, of $717,589. The average cost of the public printing under the Republican administration per year, was $165,823; average cost per annum under Hampton’s administration, $6,178. The amount appropriated for one year, 1872-73, by the Republicans, for printing, was $450,000; amount appropriated in 25 years ending in 1866, $278,251. Excess of one year’s appropriation over 25 years, $171,749. The cost of printing in South Carolina exceeded in one year by $122,932.13 the cost of like work in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Maryland together. In 1860 the taxable values in the State amounted to $490,000,000, and the tax to a little less than $400,000. In 1871 the taxable value had been reduced to $184,000,000, and the tax increased to $2,000,000. In 19 counties taken together, 93,293 acres of land were sold in one year for unpaid taxes. After four years of Republican rule, the debt of the State had increased from $5,407,306 to $18,515,033. There had been no public works of any importance, and the “entire thirteen millions of dollars represented nothing but unnecessary and profligate expenditures and stealings.”[94] The governor’s pardon was a matter of mere bargain and sale. During Moses’s term of two years, he issued 457 pardons—pardoning during the last month of his tenure of office 46 of the 168 convicts whom he had hitherto left in jail. In May, 1875, Governor Chamberlain declared, in an interview with a correspondent of the _Cincinnati Commercial_, that when at the end of Moses’s administration he entered on his duties as governor, 200 trial justices were holding offices by executive appointment who could neither read nor write.[95] These statements are but fragments taken from the papers by Mr. Hemphill, Governor Hampton, and others, who cite the public records, and are simply bare statistics. No account has been taken of the imposition practised throughout the South during the period of Negro domination; of the vast, incredible, and wanton degradation of the Southern people by the malefactors, who, with hoards of ignorant Negroes just freed from the bonds of slavery as their instruments, trod down the once stately South at their will. No wonder that Governor Chamberlain, Republican and carpet-bagger as he was, should have declared, as he did in writing to the New England Society: “The civilization of the Puritan and Cavalier, of the Roundhead and Huguenot, is in peril.”[96]