Hastings's personal task was to provide the ways and means for this exhausting war.
These are subdivided into twenty provinces, each administered by an administrator of native affairs by whose side is the provincial council consisting of natives and occupied with the discussion of ways and means and questions of public works.
From 1891 to 1895 he represented the First Congressional District of Nebraska, normally Republican, in the national House of Representatives, and received the unusual honour of being placed on the important Committee on Ways and Means during his first term.
This item alone amounted during the previous forty-six years, the parliament declared, " at the least to eight score thousand pounds, besides other great and intolerable sums which have yearly been conveyed to the said court of Rome by many other ways and means to the great impoverishment of this realm."
The Whigs having the ascendancy in the TwentySeventh Congress, he was made chairman of the House Committee of Ways and Means.