Scarcely a failure of the Confederation Government can be found which does not lead in the last analysis to the financial situation both during and following the war. Suddenly plunged into the Revolutionary War, drained of ready money by the colonial system, possessed of no mines, mints, nor any resource for securing a medium of exchange except an undependable paper promise to pay, the people of the United States emerged from the war broken in purse and overwhelmed with debt. According to Jefferson's estimate made at the time, they owed at least sixty-eight millions of dollars. To this fruit of the war he added the four hundred millions of paper money issued by the Federal and State Governments, estimated, in its depreciated condition, at about seventy-two millions more of debt. The ragged Continental soldiers, frequently reduced to seven-tenths of a pound rations, their arrearages of wages paid in Continental currency worth four pence on the dollar, were now about to be discharged to return to their needy families carrying only paper promises of the United States to pay. These certificates could be disposed of only to brokers and that at ruinous rates. What was to become of a veteran who was disabled? Congress had already authorised the several States to look up needy soldiers of the Continental service and pay them five dollars a month, such sums to be deducted from the quotas assessed on the several States to meet the general expenses. Seven States only had complied, and in these the lists of needy ex-soldiers had been incompletely compiled. Some soldiers held certificates entitling them to bounty lands in the back country under the acts of 1776 and 1780, but had no means of journeying thither. Small wonder that mutiny threatened. "Can you consent to be the only sufferers by this revolution," asked the insurrectionary Newburg addresses, the work of those unwilling to see the army disbanded before being assured of receiving justice, "and, retiring from the field, grow old in poverty, wretchedness, and contempt? If you can--go--and carry with you the jest of Tories and the scorn of Whigs--the ridicule and, what is worse, the pity of the world. Go--starve --and be forgotten." Eulogy has exhausted itself in praise of these Revolutionary veterans, who eventually permitted their ranks to be disbanded, instead of joining themselves together illegally to obtain justice, or subsisting themselves upon the country at large. Praise has not been withheld from their general, the Virginia soldier-farmer, who, instead of taking advantage of the dissatisfaction to put himself at the head of an insurrectionary force, chose rather to quiet rebellion and to inspire confidence by his hopefulness.