And so Lincoln asked for and got what Adams and Clay would have envied: internal improvements including a railroad to the Pacific, the cheap sale for settlement of western public lands, subsidized state universities, a protective tariff, a centralized banking system, and even, while the war lasted, a federal income tax. Only the banks and taxes had current military utility. The rest laid foundations for the power without which, in the twentieth century, the “new world” couldn’t repeatedly have rescued liberty in the “old.”88
