tried to help itself out; for it speedily and completely failed.  The Conscription Act, which became law on March 3, 1863, set up for the first time an organisation for recruiting which covered the whole country but was under the complete control of the Federal Government.  It was placed under an officer of great ability, General J. B. Fry, formerly chief of staff to Buell, and now entitled Provost-Marshal-General.  It was his business, through provost-marshals in a number of districts, each divisible into sub-districts as convenience might require, to enroll all male citizens between twenty and forty-five.  He was to assign a quota, in other words a stated proportion of the number of troops for which the Government might at any time call, to each district, having regard to the number of previous enlistments from each district.  The management of voluntary enlistment was placed in his hands, in order that the two methods of recruiting might be worked in harmony.  The system as a whole was quite distinct from any such system of universal service as might have been set up beforehand in time of peace.  Compulsion only came into force in default of sufficient volunteers from any district to provide its required number of the troops wanted.  When it came into force the “drafts” of conscripts were chosen by lot from among those enrolled as liable for service.  But there was a way of escape from actual service.  It seems, from what Lincoln wrote, to have been looked upon as a time-honoured principle, established by precedent in all countries, that the man on whom the lot fell might provide a substitute if he could.  The market price of a substitute (a commodity for the provision of which a class of “substitute brokers” came into being) proved to be about 1,000 dollars.  Business or professional men, who felt they could not be spared from home but wished to act patriotically, did buy substitutes; but they need not have done so, for the law contained a provision intended, as Lincoln recorded, to safeguard poorer men against such a rise in prices.  They could escape by paying 300 dollars, or 60 pounds, not, in the then state of wages, an extravagant penalty upon an able-bodied man.  The sums paid under this provision covered the cost of the recruiting business.

Most emphatically the Conscription Law operated mainly as a stimulus to voluntary enlistment.  The volunteer received, as the conscript did not, a bounty from the Government; States, counties, and smaller localities, when once a quota was assigned to them, vied with one another in filling their quota with volunteers, and for that purpose added to the Government bounty.  It goes without saying that in a new country, with its scattered country population and its disorganised great new towns, there were plenty of abuses.  Substitute brokers provided the wrong article; ingenious rascals invented the trade of “bounty-jumping,” and would enlist for a bounty, desert, enlist for