The price of commutation amounted to almost a year’s wages for an unskilled laborer. “The rich are exempt!” proclaimed an Iowa editor. "Did you ever know aristocratic legislation to so directly point out the poor man as inferior to the rich?” On the face of it, the privileges of commutation and substitution did seem to make the conscription act, in the words of a modern historian, “one of the worst pieces of class legislation ever passed by the United States Congress.”24
