The exigencies of Government finance under the stress of presentday conditions call to mind the difficulties with which the new Federal Government and its youthful Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, were confronted at the beginning of the first Washington administration. Indeed the manner in which the first Secretary of the Treasury met these problems and the lessons which his solutions seem to have for the present emergency have occasioned the reprinting of Hamilton's great State papers on the national debt, the establishment of a national bank, and the protection of manufactures. Under the inspiration of the Honorable Elihu Root and President Butler of Columbia University, these documents have been reissued in a volume entitled “Papers on Public Credit, Commerce, and Finance.”