There was much calculating on all sides of the amount the new tax bills would yield. _Harper’s Weekly_ at the start estimated that it would be $185,000,000, and in November (1862) it said the amount would be nearer $275,000,000, but it was far too sanguine. At the end of the year (June, 1863) it was found that the customs had yielded less than $64,000,000 and the excise only about $41,000,000, and the country had been spending in the last two years an average of over one and one-half millions a day. The funds raised by taxation were a bagatelle beside the enormous loans which had to be made, the legal tender which had to be issued. By the beginning of 1864 it became evident to Mr. Lincoln and his cabinet that more money must be raised by taxation. It was not a popular thing to do, for the slow progress of the war, the awful cost in life and money, had raised a strong party against Lincoln. It looked as if he might not be reëlected. The opportunists around him advised against any measures which would increase dissatisfaction, but Mr. Lincoln wanted no misunderstanding about his intentions in regard to the war. It had got to be finished at all cost, and he wanted the people to understand what his reëlection meant. He asked them for more men and more money, another draft, higher taxes, higher tariffs. The raising of the tariff was as a method much less disturbing to Lincoln than imposing direct taxes. He had the old Whig’s horror of the tax-collector, and indeed had pictured effectively in his early campaigning “assessors and collectors going forth like swarms of Egyptian locusts, devouring every blade of grass and other green thing.” In 1859, when there was a general curiosity as to what he believed, a correspondent asked him as to his tariff views, and he replied: “I was an old Henry Clay-Tariff-Whig in old times, and made more speeches on that subject than any other. I have not since changed my views. I believe yet, if we could have a moderate, carefully-adjusted protective tariff, so far acquiesced in as not to be a perpetual subject of political strife, squabbles, changes and uncertainties, it would be better for us. Still it is my opinion that just now the revival of that question will not advance the cause itself or the man who revives it.... We, the old Whigs, have been entirely beaten out on the tariff question, and we shall not be able to reëstablish the policy until the absence of it shall have demonstrated the necessity for it in the minds of men heretofore opposed to it.”