Yet another difficulty discloses itself when we come to examine his cash accounts.  We find, for example, that from August 3, 1775, to September, 1783, leaving out of the reckoning his military receipts, he took in a total of about eighty thousand one hundred sixty-seven pounds.  What then more simple than to divide this sum by seven and ascertain his average receipts during the years of the Revolution?  But when we come to examine some of the details more closely we are brought to pause.  We discover such facts as that in 1780 a small steer, supposed to weigh about three hundred pounds, brought five hundred pounds in money!  A sheep sold for one hundred pounds; six thousand five hundred sixty-nine pounds of dressed beef brought six thousand five hundred sixty-nine pounds; the stud fee for “Steady” was sixty pounds.  In other words, the accounts in these years were in depreciated paper and utterly worthless for our purposes.  Washington himself gave the puzzle up in despair toward the end of the war and paid his manager in produce, not money.

We of to-day have, in fact, not the faintest conception of the blessing we enjoy in a uniform and fairly stable monetary system.  Even before the days of the “Continentals” there was depreciated paper afloat that had been issued by the colonial governments and, unless the fact is definitely stated, when we come upon figures of that period we can never be sure whether they refer to pounds sterling or pounds paper, or, if the latter, what kind of paper.  People had to be constantly figuring the real value of Pennsylvania money, or Virginia money or Massachusetts money, and one meets with many such calculations on the blank leaves of Washington’s account books.  Even metallic money was a Chinese puzzle except to the initiated, there were so many kinds of it afloat.  Among our Farmer’s papers I have found a list of the money that he took with him to Philadelphia on one occasion—­6 joes, 67 half joes, 2 one-eighteenth joes, 3 doubloons, 1 pistole, 2 moidores, 1 half moidore, 2 double louis d’or, 3 single louis d’or, 80 guineas, 7 half guineas, besides silver and bank-notes.

The depreciation of the paper currency during the Revolution proved disastrous to him in several ways.  When the war broke out much of the money he had obtained by marriage was loaned out on bond, or, as we would say to-day, on mortgage.  “I am now receiving,” he soon wrote, “a shilling in the pound in discharge of Bonds which ought to have been paid me, & would have been realized before I left Virginia, but for my indulgences to the debtors.”  In 1778 he said that six or seven thousand pounds that he had in bonds upon interest had been paid in depreciated paper, so that the real value was now reduced to as many hundreds.  Some of the paper money that came into his hands he invested in government securities, and at least ten thousand pounds of these in Virginia money were ultimately funded by the federal government for six thousand two hundred and forty-six dollars in three and six per cent. bonds.