will say I consider his criticism of their action on that occasion as
not only unjust, but ungenerous. I knew they were looking forward with a
far-reaching ken of enlightened statesmanship to the pitiable condition
in which Philadelphia will be left unless speedily supplied with
railroad connection in some way or other with this garden spot of the
universe. And beside, sir, this discussion has relieved my mind of a
mystery that has weighed upon it like an incubus for years. I could
never understand before why there was so much excitement during the last
Congress over the acquisition of Alta Vela. I could never understand why
it was that some of our ablest statesmen and most disinterested patriots
should entertain such dark forebodings of the untold calamities that
were to befall our beloved country unless we should take immediate
possession of that desirable island. But I see now that they were
laboring under the mistaken impression that the government would need
the guano to manure the public lands on the St. Croix.

Now, sir, I repeat, I have been satisfied for years that if there was
any portion of the inhabited globe absolutely in a suffering condition
for want of a railroad it was these teeming pine barrens of the St.
Croix. At what particular point on that noble stream such a road should
be commenced I knew was immaterial, and it seems so to have been
considered by the draughtsman of this bill. It might be up at the spring
or down at the foot-log, or the water-gate, or the fish-dam, or anywhere
along the bank, no matter where. But in what direction should it run, or
where it should terminate, were always to my mind questions of the most
painful perplexity. I could conceive of no place on “God’s green earth”
in such straitened circumstances for railroad facilities as to be likely
to desire or willing to accept such a connection. I knew that neither
Bayfield nor Superior city would have it, for they both indignantly
spurned the munificence of the government when coupled with such
ignominious conditions, and let this very same land grant die on their
hands years and years ago rather than submit to the degradation of a
direct communication by railroad with the piny woods of the St. Croix;
and I knew that what the enterprising inhabitants of those giant young
cities would refuse to take would have few charms for others, whatever
their necessities or cupidity might be.

Hence as I have said, sir, I was utterly at a loss to determine where
the terminus of this great and indispensable road should be, until I
accidentally overheard some gentleman the other day mention the name of
“_Duluth_.”

_Duluth!_ The word fell upon my ear with a peculiar and indescribable
charm, like the gentle murmur of a low fountain stealing forth in the
midst of roses; or the soft, sweet accents of an angel’s whisper in the
bright, joyous dream of sleeping innocence.

“_Duluth!_” ’Twas the name for which my soul had panted for years, as
the hart panteth for the water-brooks. But where was _Duluth_? Never in
all my limited reading, had my vision been gladdened by seeing the
celestial word in print. And I felt a profound humiliation in my
ignorance that its dulcet syllables had never before ravished my
delighted ear. I was certain the draughtsman in this bill had never
heard of it or it would have been designated as one of the termini of
this road. I asked my friends about it, but they knew nothing of it. I
rushed to the library, and examined all the maps I could find. I
discovered in one of them a delicate hairlike line, diverging from the
Mississippi near a place marked Prescott, which, I supposed, was
intended to represent the river St. Croix, but, could nowhere find
_Duluth_. Nevertheless, I was confident it existed somewhere, and that
its discovery would constitute the crowning glory of the present
century, if not of all modern times. I knew it was bound to exist in the
very nature of things; that the symmetry and perfection of our planetary
system would be incomplete without it. That the elements of maternal
nature would since have resolved themselves back into original chaos if
there had been such a hiatus in creation as would have resulted from
leaving out _Duluth_! In fact, sir, I was overwhelmed with the
conviction that _Duluth_ not only existed somewhere, but that wherever
it was, it was a great and glorious place. I was convinced that the
greatest calamity that ever befell the benighted nations of the ancient
world was in their having passed away without a knowledge of the actual
existence of _Duluth_; that their fabled Atlantis, never seen save by
the hallowed vision of the inspired poesy, was, in fact, but another
name for _Duluth_; that the golden orchard of the Hesperides, was but a
poetical synonym for the beer-gardens in the vicinity of _Duluth_. I was
certain that Herodotus had died a miserable death, because in all his
travels and with all his geographical research he had never heard of
_Duluth_. I knew that if the immortal spirit of Homer could look down
from another heaven than that created by his own celestial genius upon
the long lines of pilgrims from every nation of the earth to the gushing
fountain of poesy opened by the touch of his magic wand, if he could be
permitted to behold the vast assemblage of grand and glorious
productions of the lyric art called into being by his own inspired
strains, he would weep tears of bitter anguish that, instead of
lavishing all the stores of his mighty genius upon the fall of Illion,
it had not been his more blessed lot to crystalize in deathless song the
rising glories of _Duluth_. Yes, sir, had it not been for this map,
kindly furnished me by the legislature of Minnesota, I might have gone
down to my obscure and humble grave in an agony of despair, because I
could nowhere find _Duluth_. Had such been my melancholy fate, I have no
doubt that with the last feeble pulsation of my breaking heart, with the
last faint exhalation of my fleeting breath, I should have whispered,
“Where is _Duluth_?”

But, thanks to the beneficence of that band of ministering angels who
have their bright abodes in the far-off capital of Minnesota, just as
the agony of my anxiety was about to culminate in the frenzy of despair,
this blessed map was placed in my hands; and as I unfolded it a
resplendent scene of ineffable glory opened before me, such as I
imagined burst upon the enraptured vision of the wandering peri through
the opening gates of Paradise. There, there, for the first time, my
enchanted eye rested upon the ravishing word, “_Duluth!_” This map, sir,
is intended, as it appears from its title, to illustrate the position of
_Duluth_ in the United States; but if gentlemen will examine it, I think
they will concur with me in the opinion, that it is far too modest in
its pretensions. It not only illustrates the position of _Duluth_ in the
United States, but exhibits its relations with all created things. It
even goes further than this. It hits the shadowy vale of futurity, and
affords us a view of the golden prospects of _Duluth_ far along the dim
vista of ages yet to come.

If gentlemen will examine it, they will find _Duluth_ not only in the
center of the map, but represented in the center of a series of
concentric circles one hundred miles apart, and some of them as much as
four thousand miles in diameter, embracing alike, in their tremendous
sweep the fragrant savannas of the sunlit South and the eternal
solitudes of snow that mantle the ice-bound North. How these circles
were produced is perhaps one of those primordial mysteries that the most
skilled paleologist will never be able to explain. But the fact is, sir,
_Duluth_ is pre-eminently a central point, for I am told by gentlemen
who have been so reckless of their own personal safety as to venture
away into those awful regions where _Duluth_ is supposed to be, that it
is so exactly in the center of the visible universe that the sky comes
down at precisely the same distance all around it.

I find, by reference to this map, that _Duluth_ is situated somewhere
near the western end of Lake Superior, but as there is no dot or other
mark indicating its exact location, I am unable to say whether it is
actually confined to any particular spot, or whether “it is just lying
around there loose.” I really cannot tell whether it is one of those
ethereal creations of intellectual frostwork, more intangible than the
rose-tinted clouds of a summer sunset; one of those airy exhalations of
the speculator’s brain which, I am told, are very flitting in the form
of towns and cities along those lines of railroad, built with government
subsidies, luring the unwary settler as the mirage of the desert lures
the famishing traveler on, and ever on, until it fades away in the
darkening horizon; or whether it is a real, _bona fide_, substantial
city, all “staked off,” with the lots marked with their owners’ names,
like that proud commercial metropolis recently discovered on the
desirable shores of San Domingo. But, however that may be, I am
satisfied _Duluth_ is there, or thereabouts, for I see it stated here on
the map that it is exactly thirty-nine hundred and ninety miles from
Liverpool, though I have no doubt, for the sake of convenience, it will
be moved back ten miles, so as to make the distance an even four
thousand.

Then, sir, there is the climate of _Duluth_, unquestionably the most
salubrious and delightful to be found anywhere on the Lord’s earth. Now,
I have always been under the impression, as I presume other gentlemen
have, that in the region around Lake Superior it was cold enough for at
least nine months in the year to freeze the smoke-stack off a
locomotive. But I see it represented on this map that _Duluth_ is
situated exactly half way between the latitudes of Paris and Venice, so
that gentlemen who have inhaled the exhilarating air of the one, or
basked in the golden sunlight of the other, may see at a glance that
_Duluth_ must be the place of untold delight, a terrestrial paradise,
fanned by the balmy zephyrs of an eternal spring, clothed in the
gorgeous sheen of ever blooming flowers, and vocal with the silvery
melody of nature’s choicest songsters. In fact sir, since I have seen
this map, I have no doubt that Byron was vainly endeavoring to convey
some faint conception of the delicious charms of _Duluth_ when his
poetic soul gushed forth, in the rippling strains of that beautiful
rhapsody—

        “Know ye the land of the cedar and the vine,
        Whence the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine;
        Where the light wings of Zephyr, oppressed with perfume,
        Wax faint o’er the gardens of Gul in her bloom;
        Where the citron and olive are fairest of fruit,
        And the voice of the nightingale never is mute;
        Where the tints of the earth and the hues of the sky,
        In color though varied, in beauty may vie?”

As to the commercial resources of _Duluth_, sir, they are simply
illimitable and inexhaustible, as is shown by this map. I see it stated
here that there is a vast scope of territory, embracing an area of over
two millions of square miles, rich in every element of material wealth
and commercial prosperity, all tributary to _Duluth_. Look at it, sir,
(pointing to the map.) Here are inexhaustible mines of gold,
immeasurable veins of silver, impenetrable depths of boundless forest,
vast coal measures, wide extended plains of richest pasturage—all, all
embraced in this vast territory—which must, in the very nature of
things, empty the untold treasures of its commerce into the lap of
_Duluth_. Look at it, sir, (pointing to the map); do not you see from
these broad, brown lines drawn around this immense territory, that the
enterprising inhabitants of _Duluth_ intend some day to inclose it all
in one vast corral, so that its commerce will be bound to go there
whether it would or not? And here, sir, (still pointing to the map), I
find within a convenient distance the Piegan Indians, which, of all the
many accessories to the glory of _Duluth_, I consider by far the most
inestimable. For, sir, I have been told that when the small-pox breaks
out among the women and children of the famous tribe, as it sometimes
does, they afford the finest subjects in the world for the strategical
experiments of any enterprising military hero who desires to improve
himself in the noble art of war, especially for any valiant
lieutenant-general whose

                   “Trenchant blade, Toledo trusty,
                 For want of fighting has grown rusty,
                 And eats into itself for lack,
                 Of somebody to hew and hack.”

Sir, the great conflict now raging in the Old World has presented a
phenomenon in military science unprecedented in the annals of mankind, a
phenomenon that has reversed all the traditions of the past as it has
disappointed all the expectations of the present. A great and warlike
people, renowned alike for their skill and valor, have been swept away
before the triumphant advance of an inferior foe, like autumn stubble
before a hurricane of fire. For aught I know the next flash of electric
fire that simmers along the ocean cable may tell us that Paris, with
every fibre quivering with the agony of impotent despair, writhes
beneath the conquering heel of her loathed invader. Ere another moon
shall wax and wane, the brightest star in the galaxy of nations may fall
from the zenith of her glory never to rise again. Ere the modest violets
of early spring shall ope their beauteous eyes, the genius of
civilization may chant the wailing requiem of the proudest nationality
the world has ever seen, as she scatters her withered and tear-moistened
lilies o’er the bloody tomb of butchered France. But, sir, I wish to ask
if you honestly and candidly believe that the Dutch would have overrun
the French in that kind of style if General Sheridan had not gone over
there, and told King William and Von Moltke how he had managed to whip
the Piegan Indians.

And here, sir, recurring to this map, I find in the immediate vicinity
of the Piegans “vast herds of buffalo” and “immense fields of rich wheat
lands.” [Here the hammer fell.]

[Many cries: “Go on!” “go on!”]

The Speaker—Is there any objection to the gentleman from Kentucky
continuing his remarks? The chair hears none. The gentleman will
proceed.

Mr. Knott—I was remarking, sir, upon these vast “wheat fields”
represented on this map in the immediate neighborhood of the buffaloes
and Piegans, and was about to say that the idea of there being these
immense wheat fields in the very heart of a wilderness, hundreds and
hundreds of miles beyond the utmost verge of civilization, may appear to
some gentlemen as rather incongruous, as rather too great a strain on
the “blankets” of veracity. But to my mind there is no difficulty in the
matter whatever. The phenomenon is very easily accounted for. It is
evident, sir, that the Piegans sowed that wheat there and ploughed it in
with buffalo bulls. Now, sir, this fortunate combination of buffaloes
and Piegans, considering their relative positions to each other and to
_Duluth_, as they are arranged on this map, satisfies me that _Duluth_
is destined to be the best market of the world. Here, you will observe,
(pointing to the map), are the buffaloes, directly between the Piegans
and _Duluth_; and here, right on the road to _Duluth_, are the Creeks.
Now, sir, when the buffaloes are sufficiently fat from grazing on those
immense wheat fields, you see it will be the easiest thing in the world
for the Piegans to drive them on down, stay all night with their
friends, the Creeks, and go into _Duluth_ in the morning. I think I see
them, now, sir, a vast herd of buffaloes, with their heads down, their
eyes glaring, their nostrils dilated, their tongues out, and their tails
curled over their backs, tearing along toward _Duluth_, with about a
thousand Piegans on their grass-bellied ponies, yelling at their heels!
On they come! And as they sweep past the Creeks, they join in the chase,
and away they all go, yelling, bellowing, ripping and tearing along,
amid clouds of dust, until the last buffalo is safely penned in the
stock-yards at _Duluth_.

Sir, I might stand here for hours and hours, and expatiate with rapture
upon the gorgeous prospects of _Duluth_, as depicted upon this map. But
human life is too short, and the time of this house far too valuable to
allow me to linger longer upon this delightful theme. I think every
gentleman upon this floor is as well satisfied as I am that _Duluth_ is
destined to become the commercial metropolis of the universe and that
this road should be built at once. I am fully persuaded that no
patriotic representative of the American people, who has a proper
appreciation of the associated glories of _Duluth_ and the St. Croix,
will hesitate a moment that every able-bodied female in the land,
between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, who is in favor of “woman’s
rights,” should be drafted and set to work upon this great work without
delay. Nevertheless, sir, it grieves my very soul to be compelled to say
that I cannot vote for the grant of lands provided for in this bill.

Ah, sir, you can have no conception of the poignancy of my anguish that
I am deprived of that blessed privilege! There are two insuperable
obstacles in the way. In the first place my constituents, for whom I am
acting here, have no more interest in this road than they have in the
great question of culinary taste now, perhaps, agitating the public mind
of Dominica, as to whether the illustrious commissioners, who recently
left this capital for that free and enlightened republic, would be
better fricasseed, boiled, or roasted, and, in the second place, these
lands, which I am asked to give away, alas, are not mine to bestow! My
relation to them is simply that of trustee to an express trust. And
shall I ever betray that trust? Never, sir! Rather perish _Duluth_!
Perish the paragon of cities! Rather let the freezing cyclones of the
bleak northwest bury it forever beneath the eddying sands of the raging
St. Croix.

             Henry Carey’s Speech on the Rates of Interest.

         _In the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention, 1873._

In the Constitutional Convention, in Committee of the Whole on the
article reported from the Committee on Agriculture, Mining,
Manufactures, and Commerce, the first section being as follows:—“In the
absence of special contracts the legal rate of interest and discount
shall be seven per centum per annum, but special contracts for higher or
lower rates shall be lawful. All national and other banks of issue shall
be restricted to the rate of seven per centum per annum.” Mr. H. C.
Carey made an address in favor of striking out the section. The
following is an abstract of his remarks:—

Precisely a century and a half since, in 1723, the General Assembly of
Pennsylvania reduced the legal charge for the use of money from eight to
six per cent. per annum. This was a great step in the direction of
civilization, proving, as it did, that the labor of the present was
obtaining increased power over accumulations of the past, the laborer
approaching toward equality with the capitalist. At that point it has
since remained, with, however, some change in the penalties which had
been then prescribed for violations of the law.

Throughout the recent war the financial policy of the National
Government so greatly favored the money-borrower and the laborer as to
have afforded reason for believing that the actual rate of interest was
about to fall permanently below the legal one, with the effect of
speedily causing usury laws to fall into entire disuse. Since its close,
however, under a mistaken idea that such was the real road to
resumption, all the Treasury operation of favoring the money-lender; the
result exhibiting itself in the facts that combinations are being
everywhere formed for raising the price of money; that the long loans of
the past are being daily more and more superseded by the call loans of
the present; that manufacturer and merchant are more and more fleeced by
Shylocks who would gladly take “the pound of flesh nearest the heart”
from all over whom they are enabled to obtain control.

Anxious for the perpetuation of this unhappy state of things, these
latter now invite their victims to give their aid towards leveling the
barriers by which they themselves are even yet to a considerable extent
protected, assuring them that further grant of power will be followed by
greater moderation in its exercise. Misled thereby, money borrowers,
traders, and manufacturers are seen uniting, year after year with their
common enemy in the effort at obtaining a repeal of the laws in regard
to money, under which the State has so greatly prospered. Happily our
working men, farmers, mechanics, and laborers fail to see that advantage
is likely to accrue to them from a change whose obvious tendency is that
of increasing the power of the few who have money to lend over the many
who need to borrow; and hence it is that their Representatives at
Harrisburg have so steadily closed their ears against the siren song by
which it is sought to lead their constituents to give their aid to the
work of their own destruction.

Under these circumstances is it that we are now asked to give place in
the organic law to a provision by means of which this deplorable system
is to be made permanent, the Legislature being thereby prohibited, be
the necessity what it may, from placing any restraint upon the few who
now control the supply of the most important of all the machinery of
commerce, as against the many whose existence, and that of their wives
and children, is dependent upon the obtaining the use thereof on such
terms as shall not from year to year cause them to become more and more
mere tools in the hands of the already rich. This being the first time
in the world’s history that any such idea has been suggested, it may be
well, before determining on its adoption, to study what has been
elsewhere done in this direction, and what has been the result.

Mr. Carey then proceeded to quote at great length from recent and able
writers the results that had followed in England from the adoption of
the proposition now before the convention. These may be summed up as the
charging of enormous rates of interest, the London joint stock banks
making dividends among their stockholders to the extent of twenty,
thirty, and almost forty per cent., the whole of which has ultimately to
be taken from the wages of labor employed in manufactures, or in
agriculture. At no time, said Mr. Carey, in Britain’s history, have
pauperism and usury traveled so closely hand in hand together; the rich
growing rich to an extent that, till now, would have been regarded as
fabulous, and the wretchedness of the poor having grown in like
proportion.

After discussing the effects of the repeal of the usury laws in some of
the American States, Mr. Carey continued:—

“We may be told, however, that at times money is abundant, and that even
so late as last summer it was difficult to obtain legal interest. Such
certainly was the case with those who desired to put it out on call; but
at that very moment those who needed to obtain the use of money for long
periods were being taxed, even on securities of unexceptionable
character, at double, or more than double, the legal rates. The whole
tendency of the existing system is in the direction of annihilating the
disposition for making those permanent loans of money by means of which
the people of other countries are enabled to carry into effect
operations tending to secure to themselves control of the world’s
commerce. Under that system there is, and there can be, none of that
stability in the price of money required for carrying out such
operations.

Leaving out of view the recent great combination for the maintenance and
perpetuation of slavery, there has been none so powerful, none so
dangerous as that which now exists among those who, having obtained a
complete control of the money power, are laboring to obtain legal
recognition of the right of capital to perfect freedom as regards all
the measures to which it may be pleased to resort for the purpose of
obtaining more perfect control over labor. Already several of the States
have to some extent yielded to the pressure that has been brought to
bear upon them. Chief among these is Massachusetts, the usury laws
having there been totally repealed, and with the effect, says a
distinguished citizen of that State, that “all the savings institutions
of the city at once raised the rate from six to seven per cent.; those
out of the city to seven and a half and eight per cent. and there was no
rate too high for the greedy. The consequence,” as he continues, “has
been disastrous to industrial pursuits. Of farming towns in my county,
more than one quarter have diminished in population.” Rates per day have
now to a great extent, as I am assured, superseded the old rates per
month or year; two cents per day, or $7.30 per annum, having become the
charge for securities of the highest order. What, under such
circumstances, must be the rate for paper of those who, sound and
solvent as they may be, cannot furnish such security, may readily be
imagined. Let the monopoly system be maintained and the rate, even at
its headquarters, New England, will attain a far higher point than any
that has yet been reached; this, too, in despite of the fact that her
people had so promptly secured to themselves a third of the whole
circulation allowed to the 40,000,000 of the population of the Union
scattered throughout almost a continent. How greatly they value the
power that has been thus obtained is proved by the fact that to every
effort at inducing them to surrender, for advantage of the West or
South, any portion thereof, has met with resistance so determined that
nothing has been yet accomplished.

Abandonment of our present policy is strongly urged upon us for the
reason that mortgages bear in New York a higher rate of interest. A
Pennsylvanian in any of the northern counties has, as we are told, but
to cross the line to obtain the best security at seven per cent. Why,
however, is it that his neighbors find themselves compelled to go abroad
when desirous of obtaining money on such security? The answer to this
question is found in the fact that the taxation of mortgages is there so
great as to absorb from half to two-thirds of the interest promised to
be paid.

Again, we are told that Ohio legalizes “special contracts” up to eight
per cent. and, that if we would prevent the efflux of capital we must
follow in the same direction. Is there, however, in the exhibit now made
by that State, anything to warrant us in so doing? Like Pennsylvania,
she has abundant coal and ore. She has two large cities, the one
fronting on the Ohio, and the other on the lakes, giving her more
natural facilities for maintaining commerce than are possessed by
Pennsylvania; and yet, while the addition to her population in the last
decade was but 306,000, that of Pennsylvania was 615,000. In that time
she added 900 to her railroad mileage, Pennsylvania meantime adding
2,500. While her capital engaged in manufactures rose from 57 to 141
millions, that of Pennsylvania grew from 109 to 406, the mere increase
of the one being more than fifty per cent. in excess of the total of the
other. May we find in these figures any evidence that capital has been
attracted to Ohio by a higher rate of interest, or repelled from our
State by a lower one? Assuredly not!

What in this direction is proposed to be done among ourselves is shown
in the section now presented for our consideration. By it the legal rate
in the absence of “special contracts” is to be raised to seven per
cent., such “contracts,” however ruinous in their character, and
whatsoever the nature of the security, are to be legalized; the only
exception to these sweeping changes being that national banks, issuing
circulating notes are to be limited to seven per cent. Shylock asked
only “the due and forfeit of his bond.” Let this section be adopted, let
him then present himself in any of our courts, can its judge do other
than decide that “the law allows it and the court awards it,” monstrous
as may have been the usury, and discreditable as may have been the arts
by means of which the unfortunate debtor may have been entrapped?
Assuredly not. Shylock, happily, was outwitted, the bond having made no
provision for taking even “one jot of blood.” Here, the unfortunate
debtor, forced by his flinty-hearted creditor into a “special contract”
utterly ruinous, may, in view of the destruction of all hope for the
future of his wife and children, shed almost tears of blood, but they
will be of no avail; yet do we claim to live under a system whose
foundation-stone exhibits itself in the great precept from which we
learn that duty requires of us to do to others as we would that others
should do unto ourselves.

By the English law the little landowner, the mechanic who owns the house
in which he lives, is protected against his wealthy mortgagee. Here, on
the contrary, the farmer, suffering under the effects of blight or
drought, and thus deprived of power to meet with punctuality the demands
of his mortgagee, is to have no protection whatsoever. So, too, with the
poor mechanic suffering temporarily by reason of accidental incapacity
for work, and, with the sheriff full in view before him, compelled to
enter into a “special contract” doubling if not trebling, the previous
rate of interest. Infamous as may be its extortion the court may not
deny the aid required for its enforcement.

The amount now loaned on mortgage security in this State at six per
cent. is certainly not less than $400,000,000, and probably extends to
$500,000,000, a large portion of which is liable to be called for at any
moment. Let this section be adopted and we shall almost at once witness
a combined movement among mortgagees for raising the rate of interest.
Notices demanding payment will fly thick as hail throughout the State,
every holder of such security knowing well that the greater the alarm
that can be produced and the more utter the impossibility of obtaining
other moneys the larger may be made the future rate of interest. The
unfortunate mortgagor must then accept the terms, hard as they may be,
dictated to him, be they 8, 10, 12, or 20 per cent. Such, as I am
assured has been the course of things in Connecticut, where distress the
most severe has been produced by a recent abandonment by the State of
the policy under which it has in the past so greatly prospered. At this
moment her savings’ banks are engaged in compelling mortgagers to accept
eight per cent. as the present rate. How long it will be before they
will carry it up to ten or twelve, or what will be the effect, remains
to be seen. Already among ourselves the effects of the sad blunders of
our great financiers exhibit themselves in the very unpleasant fact that
sheriffs’ sales are six times more numerous than they were in the period
from 1861 to 1867, when the country was so severely suffering under the
waste of property, labor, and life, which had but then occurred. Let
this section be adopted, giving perfect freedom to the Shylocks of the
day, and the next half dozen years will witness the transfer, under the
sheriff’s hammer, of the larger portion of the real property of both the
city and the State. Of all the devices yet invented for the subjugation
of labor by capital, there is none that can claim to be entitled to take
precedence of that which has been now proposed for our consideration.

Rightly styled the Keystone of the Union, one duty yet remains to her to
be performed, to wit: that of bringing about equality in the
distribution of power over that machinery for whose use men pay
interest, which is known as money. New England, being rich and having
her people concentrated within very narrow limits, has been allowed to
absorb a portion of that power fully equal to her needs, while this
State, richer still, has been so “cabined, cribbed, confined,” that her
mine and furnace operators find it difficult to obtain that circulating
medium by whose aid alone can they distribute among their workmen their
shares of the things produced.—New York, already rich, has been allowed
to absorb a fourth of the permitted circulation, to the almost entire
exclusion of the States south of Pennsylvania and west of the
Mississippi; and hence it is that her people are enabled to levy upon
those of all these latter such enormous taxes. To the work of correcting
this enormous evil Pennsylvania should now address herself. Instead of
following in the wake of New Jersey and Connecticut, thereby giving to
the monopoly an increase of strength, let her place herself side by side
with the suffering States of the West, the South, and the Southwest,
demanding that what has been made free to New York and New England shall
be made equally free to her and them. Let her do this, and the remedy
will be secured, with such increase in the general power for developing
the wonderful resources of the Union as will speedily make of it an iron
and cloth exporting State, with such power for retaining and controlling
the precious metals as will place it on a surer footing in that respect
than any of the powers of the Eastern world. The more rapid the
societary circulation, and the greater the facility of making exchanges
from hand to hand, and from place to place, the greater is the tendency
toward reduction in the rate of interest, toward equality in the
condition of laborer and employer, and toward growth and power to
command the services of all the metals, gold and silver included.

It will be said, however, that adoption of such measures as have been
indicated would tend to produce a general rise of prices; or, in the
words of our self-styled economists, would cause “inflation.” The vulgar
error here involved was examined some thirty years since by an eminent
British economist, and with a thoroughness never before exhibited in
reference to any other economic question whatsoever, the result
exhibiting itself in the following brief words of a highly distinguished
American one, published some twelve or fifteen years since, to wit:

  “Among the innumerable influences which go to determine the general
  rate of prices, the quantity of money, or currency, is one of the
  least effective.”

Since then we have had a great war, in the course of which there have
been numerous and extensive changes in the price of commodities, every
one of which is clearly traceable to causes widely different from those
to which they so generally are attributed. Be that, however, as it may,
the question now before us is one of right and justice, and not of mere
expediency. North and east of Pennsylvania eight millions of people have
been allowed a greater share of the most important of all powers, the
money one, than has been allotted to the thirty-two millions south and
west of New York, and have thus been granted a power of taxation that
should be no longer tolerated. The basis of our whole system is to be
found in equality before the law, each and every man, each and every
State, being entitled to exercise the same powers that are permitted to
our people, or other States. If the Union is to be maintained, it can be
so on no terms other than those of recognition of the existence of the
equality that has here been indicated. To the work of compelling that
recognition Pennsylvania should give herself, inscribing on her shield
the brief words _fiat justitia, ruat cœlum_—let justice be done though
the heavens fall!

                     Speech of Gen. Simon Cameron.

  _On the benefits derived by Pennsylvania from the Policy of Internal
                             Improvements._

Any one will see, who will take the trouble to read the debates on the
location of the National Capital, that the decision of that question
seems to have been made solely with reference to a connection of the
East with the then great wilderness of the West. All the sagacious men
then in public life looked to the time when the West, with its wonderful
productive soil brought under subjection by industry, would exercise a
controlling influence on the destiny of the country. Columbia, in the
State of Pennsylvania, was at one time within one vote of becoming the
site of the Capital; and Germantown, near, and now a part of,
Philadelphia, was actually decided on as the proper location by a
majority of one. The first of these was favored because it was believed
to be a favorable point from which to begin a slack water route to the
west. Germantown near the Schuylkill, was chosen for the same reason.
All looked forward to a system of canals which would accomplish this
desirable object, and experience has fully demonstrated their wisdom in
that great design. About 1790, General Washington and the great
financier Robert Morris, traveled on horseback from Philadelphia to the
Susquehanna river, with a view of deciding whether a canal could be
built over that route.

Shortly after this, some gentlemen near Philadelphia actually began
building a canal to the west, did some work on its eastern end, built
one or two locks on the dividing ridge near Lebanon, and for want of
sufficient funds and knowledge of the subject the work was stopped. The
money expended on the enterprise was lost.

But the progressive men of the country, keeping their minds on the
subject, continued to agitate the popular mind on it until 1820, when
the Legislature of Pennsylvania chartered the Union Canal Company, and
appropriated one million dollars to aid its construction. In a few years
the canal was completed between the Schuylkill and Susquehanna. Although
very small, this improvement did a great deal of good. And the most
remarkable thing about it was its unpopularity with the masses. Not only
the members of General Assembly who passed the bill, but Governor
Heister, who signed the act of incorporation, were driven from office at
the first opportunity legally presented for testing public opinion, and
the party to which they belonged went into a minority. I remember well
what a mighty sum a million dollars seemed to be; and the political
revolution caused by this appropriation showed me that the idea of its
vastness was not confined by any means to myself.

Our system of canals was completed, and the benefits derived from them
were incalculable. When they were commenced our State was poor. Industry
languished. The interchange of her products was difficult. Population
was sparse. Intelligence was not generally diffused. Manufactures
struggled weakly along. Work was not plentiful. Wages were low. When
they were finished the busy hum of industry was heard on every hand. Our
population had grown until we numbered millions. Our iron ore beds were
yielding their precious hoards for human use. Coal mines, unknown or
useless until means were provided for transporting their wealth to
market, now sent millions of tons in every direction. Progress in every
walk of advanced civilization was realized, and we were on the high road
to permanent prosperity. But in the meantime a new and better means of
communication had been discovered, and the building of railroads quickly
reduced the value of canals, and the works we had completed at so much
cost, and with such infinite labor, were suddenly superseded. We lost
nearly all the money they had cost us, but this investment was wisely
made. The return to our State was many times greater than the outlay.

Like all great projects intended for the public good, that of Internal
Improvement progressed. In 1823, the New York canal—which had been
pushed through against the prejudiced opposition of the people, by the
genius of De Witt Clinton—was opened. Its success caused a revolution in
the public mind all over the country. The effect was so marked in the
State, that in 1825 a convention was called to consider the subject.
Every county in the State was represented, I believe. That body
pronounced in favor of a grand system of public works, which should not
only connect the East and West, but also the waters of the Susquehanna
with the great lakes, the West and the Northwest. Appropriations were
recommended to the amount of three millions of dollars, and in 1826, I
think the work began. This sum seemed to be enormous, and the estimates
of the engineers reached a total of six millions of dollars. Meeting an
ardent friend of the system one day, he declared that a sum of that
magnitude could never be expended on these works. I ventured to reply,
with great deference to his age and experience, that I thought it would
be insufficient, and before they were completed I would not be surprised
if ten millions would be found necessary. Looking at me steadily for a
few moments, he closed the conversation by exclaiming, “Young man, you
are a d——d fool!” I was thus left in full possession of his opinion of
me. But after we had spent $41,698,594.74 in the construction of these
works, I found my estimate of his judgment was singularly in harmony
with my opinion of his politeness. His candor I never doubted.

In the convention of 1825, there were two gentlemen who voted for
railways instead of canals. One was professor Vethake of Dickinson
College, Carlisle; and the other was Jacob Alter, a man of very little
education, but of strong understanding. The professor was looked upon as
a dreamer, and was supposed to have led his colleague astray in his
vagaries. But they both lived to see railroads extended over the whole
world. As a part of our system of public works, we built a railroad from
the Delaware to the Susquehanna, from Philadelphia to Columbia, and one
from the eastern base of the Allegheny mountains to their western base.
They were originally intended to be used with horse power. In the
meantime the railroad system had been commenced, and the Pennsylvania
Railroad, under the charge of a man of extraordinary ability, John Edgar
Thompson, was rapidly pushed to completion. Another great railway, the
Philadelphia and Reading, was built to carry anthracite coal from the
Schuylkill mines to the market. A railroad was built each side of the
Lehigh river, that another part of our coal territory might find a
market in New York. Another was built from the north branch of the
Susquehanna, connecting with the New York roads, and leading to the
northern coal field. And yet another was built along the Susquehanna,
through the southern coal basin, to the city of Baltimore. The total
cost of these roads, independent of the Pennsylvania railroad, was
$95,250,410.10, as shown by official reports. Their earnings last year
are officially given at $24,753,065.32. Each of these was forced to
contend with difficulty and prejudice. All were unpopular, and all were
looked upon with suspicion until they actually forced their usefulness
on the public mind. Those who made the fight for canals were forced to
go over the whole ground again for railroads, and their double victory
is greater than the success generally vouchsafed to the pioneers in any
cause. These roads, with the Pennsylvania railroad and the lesser lines
of improvements running through the coal region cost over $207,000,000.

The Reading Railroad will serve to illustrate the struggle of these
great schemes. Its stock, now worth over par, once sold for twenty cents
on the dollar; and at one time it was forced to sell its bonds at forty
cents on the dollar to pay operating expenses. The vindication of the
sagacity of the pioneers in these great enterprises is complete. All
these lines are now profitable, and it has been demonstrated everywhere
in the United States, that every new railroad creates the business from
which its stockholders receive their dividends. It seems, therefore,
scarcely possible to fix a limit to our profitable railroad expansion.
They open new fields of enterprise, and this enterprise in turn, makes
the traffic which fills the coffers of the companies.

I cannot now look back to the struggle to impress the people with the
advantages of railways, without a feeling of weariness at the seeming
hopeless struggle, and one of merriment at the general unbelief in our
new-fangled project. Once at Elizabethtown in this State a public
meeting had been called for the purpose of securing subscriptions to the
stock of the Harrisburg and Lancaster Railroad. This road was intended
to complete the railway between Philadelphia and Harrisburg, one hundred
and five miles. A large concourse had gathered. Ovid F. Johnson,
Attorney-General of our State, and a brilliant orator, made an excellent
speech; but the effect was not in proportion to the effort. I determined
to make an appeal, and I gave such arguments as I could. In closing I
predicted that those now listening to me would see the day when a man
could breakfast in Harrisburg, go to Philadelphia, transact a fair day’s
business there, and returning, eat his supper at home. Great applause
followed this, and some additional subscriptions. Abram Harnly, a friend
of the road, and one of the most intelligent of his class, worked his
way to me, and taking me aside whispered, “That was a good idea about
going to Philadelphia and back to Harrisburg the same day;” and then,
bursting with laughter, he added,—“But you and I know better than that!”
We lived to see the road built; and now people can come and go over the
distance twice a day, which Abram seemed to consider impossible for a
single daily trip.

The peculiar condition of the States then known as “the West” was the
subject of anxiety to many. They had attracted a large population, but
the people were exclusively devoted to agriculture. Lacking diversified
industry, they were without accumulated wealth to enable them to build
railways; nor were the States in condition to undertake such an onerous
duty, although several of them made a feeble attempt to do so. At one
time the bonds of Illinois, issued to build her canals, sold as low as
thirty cents on the dollar. So with Indiana. Both States were supposed
to be bankrupt. It became, therefore, an important problem as to how
means of communication should be supplied to the people of the West.
Congress, in 1846, gave a grant of land to aid in building a railroad in
Illinois. Every alternate section was given to the Company, and each
alternate section was reserved by the Government. The road was built;
and the one-half of the land retained by the government sold for a great
deal more than all was worth before the road was constructed. This idea
was original, I think, with Mr. Whitney of Mass., who spent two winters
in Washington, about 1845, endeavoring to induce Congress to adopt that
plan for the construction of a Trans-Continental Railway.

He died before seeing his scheme succeed. Others have built a road
across the continent on the Central route. Another on the Northern route
is now progressing, and the wealth and enterprise of those having it in
charge renders its completion certain. And it yet remains for us to give
the people of the Southern route a road to the Pacific which shall
develop the magnificent region through which it will pass, and give the
country one route to the great ocean protected from the ordinary
difficulty of climate with which railroads must contend over so large a
part of our territory. But I am admonished by the value of your space to
confine myself to the limits of my own State.

I have said that the outlay we have made in building our public works
was of great benefit to us even when the canals had been rendered almost
valueless through the competition of railroads. This is paradoxical, but
it is true nevertheless. That expenditure gave our people a needed
knowledge of our vast resources. It familiarized them with large
expenditures when made for the public good. And it showed them how a
great debt may be beneficially incurred, and yet not break down the
enterprise of the people. We at one time owed $41,698,595.74. By a
steady attention to our finances, it is now reduced to $31,000,000, with
resources,—the proceeds of the sale of public works—on hand amounting to
$10,000,000. And while we have been steadily reducing our State debt, we
have built 5,384 miles of railway on the surface of the earth, and 500
miles underground in our mines, at a cost of not less than $350,000,000,
for a mile of railroad in Pennsylvania means something. We sent 368,000
men to the Federal Army. And our credit stands high on every stock
exchange. Gratifying as this progress is, it is only a fair beginning.
There is a large part of our territory rich in timber and full of iron,
coal, and all kinds of mineral wealth, so entirely undeveloped by
railroads that we call it “the Wilderness.” To open it up is the
business of to-day, and I sincerely hope to see it done soon.

Forty years ago George Shoemaker, a young tavern-keeper of more vigor
and enterprise than his neighbors, came to the conclusion that
anthracite coal could be used as fuel. He went to the expense of taking
a wagon load of it to Philadelphia, a hundred miles away, and, after
peddling it about the streets for some days, was forced to give it away,
and lose his time, his labor and his coal. He afterwards saw a great
railway built to carry the same article to the same point, and enriching
thousands from the profits of the traffic. But his experience did not
end there. He saw a thousand dollars paid eagerly for an acre of coal
land, which at the time of his venture to Philadelphia, no one would
have, and he could not give away.

I have thought that a retrospective survey of our wonderful development
might point plainly to the duty of the future. For if the experience of
what has gone before is not useful to cast light on what is yet to come,
then it will be difficult indeed to discover wherein its value lies. It
teaches me to devote time and labor for the advancement of all Public
Improvements, and I trust it may have a like effect on all who have the
time and patience to read what I have here written.

                     Speech of Hon. John A. Logan,

      _On Self-Government in Louisiana, January 13 and 14, 1875._

The Senate having under consideration the resolution submitted by Mr.
SCHURZ on the 8th of January, directing the Committee of the Judiciary
to inquire what legislation is necessary to secure to the people of the
State of Louisiana their rights of Self-government under the
Constitution Mr. LOGAN said:

Mr. PRESIDENT: I believe it is considered the duty of a good sailor to
stand by his ship in the midst of a great storm. We have been told in
this Chamber that a great storm of indignation is sweeping over this
land, which will rend asunder and sink the old republican craft. We have
listened to denunciations of the President, of the republicans in this
Chamber, of the republican party as an organization, their acts
heretofore and their purposes in reference to acts hereafter, of such a
character as has seldom been listened to in this or in any other
legislative hall. Every fact on the side of the republican party has
been perverted, every falsehood on the part of the opposition has been
exaggerated, arguments have been made here calculated to inflame and
arouse a certain class of the people of this country against the
authorities of the Government, based not upon truth but upon
manufactured statements which were utterly false. The republican party
has been characterized as despotic, as tyrannical, as oppressive. The
course of the Administration and the party toward the southern people
has been denounced as of the most tyrannical character by men who have
received clemency at the hands of this same party.

Now, sir, what is the cause of all this vain declamation? What is the
cause of all this studied denunciation? What is the reason for all these
accusations made against a party or an administration? I may be
mistaken, but, if I am not, this is the commencement of the campaign of
1876. It has been thought necessary on the part of the opposition
Senators here to commence, if I may use a homely phrase, a raid upon the
republican party and upon this Administration, and to base that upon
false statements in reference to the conduct of affairs in the State of
Louisiana.

I propose in this debate, and I hope I shall not be too tedious, though
I may be somewhat so, to discuss the question that should be presented
to the American people. I propose to discuss that question fairly,
candidly, and truthfully. I propose to discuss it from a just, honest,
and legal standpoint. Sir, what is that question? There was a resolution
offered in this Chamber calling on the President to furnish certain
information. A second resolution was introduced, (whether for the
purpose of hanging on it an elaborate speech or not I am not aware,)
asking the Committee on the Judiciary to report at once some legislation
in reference to Louisiana. Without any facts presented officially
arguments have been made, the country has been aroused, and some people
have announced themselves in a manner calculated to produce a very sore
feeling against the course and conduct of the party in power. I say this
is done without the facts; without any basis whatever; without any
knowledge officially communicated to them in reference to the conduct of
any of the parties in the State of Louisiana. In discussing this
question we ought to have a standpoint; we ought to have a beginning;
some point from which we may all reason and see whether or not any great
outrage has been perpetrated against the rights of the American people
or any portion of them.

I then propose to start at this point, that there is a government in the
State of Louisiana. Whether that government is a government of right or
not is not the question. Is there a government in that State against
which treason, insurrection, or rebellion, may be committed? Is there
such a government in the State of Louisiana as should require the
maintenance of peace and order among the citizens of that State? Is
there such a government in the State of Louisiana as requires the
exercise of Executive authority for the purpose of preserving peace and
order within its borders? I ask any Senator on this floor to-day if he
can stand up here as a lawyer, as a Senator, as an honest man, and deny
the fact that a government does exist? Whether he calls it a government
_de jure_ or a government _de facto_, it is immaterial. It is such an
organization as involves the liberties and the protection of the rights
of the people of that State. It will not do for Senators to talk about
the election of 1872. The election of 1872 has no more to do with this
“military usurpation” that you speak of to-day than an election of a
hundred years ago. It is not a question as to whether this man or that
was elected. The question is, is there such a government there as can be
overturned, and has there been an attempt to overturn it? If so, then
what is required to preserve its status or preserve the peace and order
of the people?

But the other day when I asked the question of a Senator on the other
side, who was discussing this question, whether or not he indorsed the
Penn rebellion, he answered me in a playful manner that excited the
mirth of people who did not understand the question, by saying that I
had decided that there was no election, and that therefore there was no
government to overturn. Now I ask Senators, I ask men of common
understanding if that is the way to treat a question of this kind; when
asked whether insurrection against a government recognized is not an
insurrection and whether he endorses it, he says there is no government
to overturn. If there is no government to overturn, why do you make this
noise and confusion about a Legislature there? If there is no State
government, there is no State Legislature. But I will not answer in that
manner. I will not avoid the issue; I will not evade the question. I
answer there is a Legislature, as there is a State government,
recognized by the President, recognized by the Legislature, recognized
by the courts, recognized by one branch of Congress, and recognized by
the majority of the citizens by their recognition of the laws of the
State; and it will not do to undertake to avoid questions in this
manner.

Let us see, then, starting from that standpoint, what the position of
Louisiana is now, and what it has been. On the 14th day of September
last a man by the name of Penn, as to whom we have official information
this morning, with some seven or ten thousand white-leaguers made war
against that government, overturned it, dispersed it, drove the governor
from the executive chamber, and he had to take refuge under the
jurisdiction of the Government of the United States, on the soil
occupied by the United States custom-house, where the exclusive
jurisdiction of the United States Government extends, for the purpose of
protecting his own life.

This then was a revolution; this then was a rebellion; this then was
treason against the State, for which these men should have been
arrested, tried, and punished. Let gentlemen dodge the question as they
may; it may be well for some men there who engaged in this treasonable
act against the government that they had Mr. Kellogg for governor. It
might not have been so well for them, perhaps, had there been some other
man in his place. I tell the Senator from Maryland if any crowd of armed
men should undertake to disperse the government of the State of
Illinois, drive its governor from the executive chamber, enter into his
private drawers, take his private letters, and publish them, and act as
those men did, some of them would pay the penalty either in the
penitentiary or by dancing at the end of a rope.

But when this rebellion was going on against that State, these gentlemen
say it was a State affair; the Government of the United States has
nothing to do with it! That is the old-fashioned secession doctrine
again. The government of the United States has nothing to do with it!
This national government is made up of States, and each State is a part
of the Government, each is a part of its life, of its body. It takes
them all to make up the whole; and treason against any part of it is
treason against the whole of it, and it became the duty of the President
to put it down, as he did do; and, in putting down that treason against
the Kellogg government, the whole country almost responded favorably to
his action.

But our friend from Maryland, not in his seat now, [Mr. HAMILTON] said
that that was part of the cause of the elections going as they did. In
other words, my friend from Maryland undertook in a roundabout way to
endorse the Penn rebellion, and claim that people of the country did the
same thing against the government of the State of Louisiana, and on this
floor since this discussion has been going on, not one Senator on that
side of the chamber has lisped one word against the rebellion against
the government of the State of Louisiana, and all who have spoken of it
have passed it by in silence so as to indicate clearly that they endorse
it, and I believe they do.

Then, going further, the President issued his proclamation requiring
those insurgents to lay down their arms and to resume their peaceful
pursuits. This morning we have heard read at the clerk’s desk that these
men have not yet complied fully with that proclamation. Their rebellious
organization continued up to the time of the election and at the
election. When the election took place, we are told by some of these
Senators that the election was a peaceable, and a fair election, that a
majority of democrats were elected. That is the question we propose to
discuss as well as we are able to do it. They tell us that there was no
intimidation resorted to by any one in the State of Louisiana. I dislike
very much to follow out these statements that are not true and attempt
to controvert them because it does seem to me that we ought to act
fairly and candidly in this Chamber and discuss questions without trying
to pervert the issue or the facts in connection with it.

Now, I state it as a fact, and I appeal to the Senator from Louisiana to
say whether or not I state truly, that on the night before the election
in Louisiana notices were posted all over that country on the doors of
the colored republicans and the white republicans, too, of a character
giving them to understand that if they voted their lives would be in
danger; and here is one of the notices posted all over that country:

[Illustration: 2 × 6]

This “2 × 6” was to show the length and width of the grave they would
have. Not only that, but the negroes that they could impose upon and get
to vote the democratic ticket received, after they had voted, a card of
safety; and here is that card issued to the colored people whom they had
induced to vote the democratic ticket, so that they might present it if
any white-leaguers should undertake to plunder or murder them:

[Illustration: Icon]

                                           NEW ORLEANS, _Nov. 28, 1874_.

  _This is to certify that Charles Durassa, a barber by occupation, is a
  Member of the 1st Ward Colored Democratic Club, and that at the late
  election he voted for and worked in the interests of the Democratic
  Candidates._

                                              _WILLIAM ALEXANDER,
                              President 1st Ward Col’d Democratic Club._

  _NICK HOPE, Secretary._

                    ROOMS DEMOCRATIC PARISH COMMITTEE.

                                           _New Orleans, Nov. 28, 1874._

  _The undersigned, Special Committee, appointed on behalf of the Parish
  Committee, approve of the above Certificate._

                                                  _ED. FLOOD, Chairman._
                                                  _PAUL WATERMAN._
                                                  _H. J. RIVET._

  ATTEST:
      _J. H. HARDY, Ass’t Sec. Parish Committee_.

These were the certificates given to negroes who voted the democratic
ticket, that they might present them to save their lives when attacked
by the men commonly known as Ku-Klux or white-leaguers in that country;
and we are told that there is no intimidation in the State of Louisiana!

Our friend from Georgia [Mr. GORDON] has been very profuse in his
declamation as to the civility and good order and good bearing of the
people of Louisiana and the other Southern States. But, sir, this
intimidation continued up to the election. After the election, it was
necessary for the governor of that State to proceed in some manner best
calculated to preserve the peace and order of the country.

Now, Mr. President, I want to ask candid, honest, fair-minded men, after
reading the report of General Sheridan showing the murder, not for gain,
not for plunder, but for political opinions in the last few years of
thirty-five hundred persons in the State of Louisiana, all of them
republicans, not one of them a democrat—I want to ask if they can stand
here before this country and defend the democratic party of Louisiana? I
put this question to them for they have been here for days crying
against the wrongs upon the democracy of Louisiana. I want any one of
them to tell me if he is prepared to defend the democracy of Louisiana.
What is your democracy of Louisiana? You are excited, your extreme wrath
is aroused at General Sheridan because he called your White Leagues down
there “banditti.” I ask you if the murder of thirty-five hundred men in
a short time for political purposes by a band of men banded together for
the purpose of murder does not make them banditti, what it does make
them? Does it make them democrats? It certainly does not make them
republicans. Does it make them honest men? It certainly does not. Does
it make them law-abiding men? It certainly does not. Does it make them
peaceable citizens? It certainly does not. But what does it make them? A
band of men banded together and perpetrating murder in their own State?
Webster says a bandit is “a lawless or desperate fellow; a robber; a
brigand,” and “banditti” are men banded together for plunder and murder;
and what are your White Leagues banded together for if the result proves
that they are banded together for murder for political purposes?

O, what a crime it was in Sheridan to say that these men were banditti!
He is a wretch. From the papers he ought to be hanged to a lamp-post;
from the Senators he is not fit to breathe the free air of heaven or of
this free Republic; but your murderers of thirty-five hundred people for
political offenses are fit to breathe the air of this country and are
defended on this floor to-day, and they are defended here by the
democratic party, and you cannot avoid or escape the proposition. You
have denounced republicans for trying to keep the peace in Louisiana;
you have denounced the Administration for trying to suppress bloodshed
in Louisiana; you have denounced all for the same purpose; but not one
word has fallen from the lips of a solitary democratic Senator
denouncing these wholesale murders in Louisiana. You have said, “I am
sorry these things are done,” but you have defended the White Leagues;
you have defended Penn; you have defended rebellion; and you stand here
to-day the apologists of murder, of rebellion, and of treason in that
State.

I want to ask the judgment of an honest country, I want to ask the
judgment of the moral sentiments of the law-abiding people of this grand
and glorious Republic to tell me whether men shall murder by the score,
whether men shall trample the law under foot, whether men shall force
judges to resign, whether men shall force prosecuting attorneys to
resign, whether men shall take five officers of a State out and hang or
shoot them if they attempt to exercise the functions of their office,
whether men shall terrify the voters and office-holders of a State,
whether men shall undertake in violation of law to organize a
Legislature for revolutionary purposes, for the purpose of putting a
governor in possession and taking possession of the State and then ask
the democracy to stand by them—I appeal to the honest judgment of the
people of this land and ask them to respond whether this was not an
excusable case when this man used the Army to protect the life of that
State and to preserve the peace of that people? Sir, the man who will
not use all the means in his power to preserve the nationality, the
integrity of this Government, the integrity of a State or the peace and
happiness of a people, is not fit to govern, he is not fit to hold
position in this or any other civilized age.

Does liberty mean wholesale slaughter? Does republican government mean
tyranny and oppression of its citizens? Does an intelligent and
enlightened age of civilization mean murder and pillage, bloodshed at
the hands of Ku-Klux or White Leagues or anybody else, and if any one
attempts to put it down, attempts to reorganize and produce order where
chaos and confusion have reigned, they are to be denounced as tyrants,
as oppressors, and as acting against republican institutions? I say then
the happy days of this Republic are gone. When we fail to see that
republicanism means nothing, that liberty means nothing but the
unrestrained license of the mobs to do as they please, then republican
government is a failure. Liberty of the citizen means the right to
exercise such rights as are prescribed within the limits of the law so
that he does not in the exercise of these rights infringe the rights of
other citizens. But the definition is not well made by our friends on
the opposite side of this Chamber. Their idea of liberty is license; it
is not liberty, but it is license. License to do what? License to
violate law, to trample constitutions under foot, to take life, to take
property, to use the bludgeon and the gun or anything else for the
purpose of giving themselves power. What statesman ever heard of that as
a definition of liberty? What man in a civilized age has ever heard of
liberty being the unrestrained license of the people to do as they
please without any restraint of law or of authority? No man, no not one
until we found the democratic party, would advocate this proposition and
indorse and encourage this kind of license in a free country.

Mr. President, I have perhaps said more on this question of Louisiana
than might have been well for me to say on account of my strength, but
what I have said about it I have said because I honestly believed it.
What I have said in reference to it comes from an honest conviction in
my mind and in my heart of what has been done to suppress violence and
wrong. But I have a few remarks in conclusion to submit now to my
friends on the other side, in answer to what they have said not by way
of argument but by way of accusation. You say to us—I had it repeated to
me this morning in private conversation—“Withdraw your troops from
Louisiana and you will have peace.” Ah, I heard it said on this floor
once “Withdraw your troops from Louisiana and your State government will
not last a minute.” I heard that said from the opposite side of the
Chamber, and now you say “Withdraw your troops from Louisiana and you
will have peace.”

Mr. President, I dislike to refer to things that are past and gone; I
dislike to have my mind called back to things of the past; but I well
remember the voice in this Chamber once that rang out and was heard
throughout this land, “Withdraw your troops from Fort Sumter if you want
peace.” I heard that said. Now it is “Withdraw your troops from
Louisiana if you want peace.” Yes, I say, withdraw your troops from
Louisiana if you want a revolution, and that is what is meant. But, sir,
we are told, and doubtless it is believed by the Senators who tell us
so, who denounce the republican party, that it is tyrannical,
oppressive, and outrageous. They have argued themselves into the idea
that they are patriots, pure and undefiled. They have argued themselves
into the idea that the democratic party never did any wrong. They have
been out of power so long that they have convinced themselves that if
they only had control of this country for a short time, what a glorious
country they would make it. They had control for nearly forty long
years, and while they were the agents of this country—I appeal to
history to bear me out—they made the Government a bankrupt, with
rebellion and treason in the land, and were then sympathizing with it
wherever it existed. That is the condition in which they left the
country when they had it in their possession and within their control.
But they say the republican party is a tyrant; that it is oppressive. As
I have said, I wish to make a few suggestions to my friends in answer to
this accusation—oppressive to whom? They say to the South, that the
republican party has tyrannized over the South. Let me ask you how has
it tyrannized over the South? Without speaking of our troubles and
trials through which we passed, I will say this: at the end of a
rebellion that scourged this land, that drenched it with blood, that
devastated a portion of it, left us in debt and almost bankrupt, what
did the republican party do? Instead of leaving these our friends and
citizens to-day in a territorial condition where we might exercise
jurisdiction over them for the next coming twenty years, where we might
have deprived them of the rights of members on this floor, what did we
do? We reorganized them into States, admitted them back into the Union,
and through the clemency of the republican party we admitted
representatives on this floor who had thundered against the gates of
liberty for four bloody years. Is that the tyranny and oppression of
which you complain at the hands of the republican party? Is that a part
of our oppression against you southern people?

Let us go a little further. When the armed democracy, for that is what
they were, laid down their arms in the Southern States, after disputing
the right of freedom and liberty in this land for four years, how did
the republican party show itself in its acts of tyranny and oppression
toward you? You appealed to them for clemency. Did you get it? Not a man
was punished for his treason. Not a man ever knocked at the doors of a
republican Congress for a pardon who did not get it. Not a man ever
petitioned the generosity of the republican party to be excused for his
crimes who was not excused. Was that oppression upon the part of the
republicans in this land? Is that a part of the oppression of which you
accuse us?

Let us look a little further. We find to-day twenty-seven democratic
Representatives in the other branch of Congress who took arms in their
hands and tried to destroy this Government holding commissions there by
the clemency of the republican party. We find in this Chamber by the
clemency of the republican party three Senators who held such
commissions. Is that tyranny; is that oppression; is that the outrage of
this republican party on you southern people? Sir, when Jeff Davis, the
head of the great rebellion, who roams the land free as air, North,
South, East, and West, makes democratic speeches wherever invited, and
the vice-president of the southern rebellion holds his seat in the other
House of Congress, are we to be told that we are tyrants, and oppressing
the southern people? These things may sound a little harsh, but it is
time to tell the truth in this country. The time has come to talk facts.
The time has come when cowards should hide, and honest men should come
to the front and tell you plain, honest truths. You of the South talk to
us about oppressing you. You drenched your land in blood, caused weeping
throughout this vast domain, covered the land in weeds of mourning both
North and South, widowed thousands and orphaned many, made the
pension-roll as long as an army-list, made the debt that grinds the poor
of this land—for all these things you have been pardoned, and yet you
talk to us about oppression. So much for the oppression of the
republican party of your patriotic souls and selves. Next comes the
President of the United States. He is a tyrant, too. He is an oppressor
still, in conjunction with the republican party. Oppressor of what? Who
has he oppressed of your Southern people, and when, and where? When your
Ku-Klux, banded together for murder and plunder in the Southern States,
were convicted by their own confession, your own representatives pleaded
to the President and said, “Give them pardon, and it will reconcile many
of the southern people.” The President pardoned them; pardoned them of
their murder, of their plunder, of their piracy on land; and for this I
suppose he is a tyrant.

More than that, sir, this tyrant in the White House has done more for
you southern people than you ought to have asked him to do. He has had
confidence in you until you betrayed that confidence. He has not only
pardoned the offences of the South, pardoned the criminals of the
democratic party, but he has placed in high official position in this
Union some of the leading men who fought in the rebellion. He has put in
his Cabinet one of your men; he has made governors of Territories of
some of your leading men who fought in the rebellion; he has sent on
foreign missions abroad some of your men who warred against this
country; he has placed others in the Departments; and has tried to
reconcile you in every way on earth, by appealing to your people, by
recognizing them and forgiving them for their offenses, and for these
acts of generosity, for these acts of kindness, he is arraigned to-day
as a Cæsar, as a tyrant, as an oppressor.

Such kindness in return as the President has received from these people
will mark itself in the history of generosity. O, but say they, Grant
wants to oppress the White Leagues in Louisiana; therefore he is an
oppressor. Yes, Mr. President, Grant does desire that these men should
quit their everyday chivalric sports of gunning upon negroes and
republicans. He asks kindly that you stop it. He says to you, “That is
all I want you to do;” and you say that you are desirous that they shall
quit it. You have but to say it and they will quit it. It is because you
have never said it that they have not quit it. It is in the power of the
democratic party to-day but to speak in tones of majesty, of honor, and
justice in favor of human life, and your Ku-Klux and murderers will
stop. But you do not do it; and that is the reason they do not stop. In
States where it has been done they have stopped. But it will not do to
oppress those people; it will not do to make them submit and subject
them to the law; it will not do to stop these gentlemen in their daily
sports and in their lively recreations. They are White Leagues; they are
banded together as gentlemen; they are of southern blood; they are of
old southern stock; they are the chivalry of days gone by; they are
knights of the bloody shield; and the shield must not be taken from
them. Sirs, their shield will be taken from them; this country will be
aroused to its danger; this country will be aroused to do justice to its
citizens; and when it does, the perpetrators of crime may fear and
tremble. Tyranny and oppression! A people who without one word of
opposition allows men who have been the enemies of a government to come
into these legislative Halls and make laws for that government to be
told that they are oppressors is a monstrosity in declamation and
assertion. Who ever heard of such a thing before? Who ever believed that
such men could make such charges? Yet we are tyrants!

Mr. President, the reading of the title of that bill from the House only
reminds me of more acts of tyranny and oppression of the republican
party, and there is a continuation of the same great offenses constantly
going on in this Chamber. But some may say “It is strange to see Logan
defending the President of the United States.” It is not strange to me.
I can disagree with the President when I think he is wrong; and I do not
blame him for disagreeing with me; but when these attacks are made,
coming from where they do, I am ready to stand from the rising sun in
the morning to the setting sun in the evening to defend every act of his
in connection with this matter before us.

I may have disagreed with President Grant in many things; but I was
calling attention to the men who have been accusing him here, on this
floor, on the stump, and in the other House; the kind of men who do it,
the manner of its doing, the sharpness of the shafts that are sent at
him, the poisonous barbs that they bear with them, and from these men
who, at his hands, have received more clemency than any men ever
received at the hands of any President or any man who governed a
country. Why, sir, I will appeal to the soldiers of the rebel army to
testify in behalf of what I say in defense of President Grant—the
honorable men who fought against the country, if there was honor in
doing it. What will be their testimony? It will be that he captured your
armed democracy of the South, he treated them kindly, turned them loose,
with their horses, with their wagons, with their provisions; treated
them as men, and not as pirates. Grant built no prison-pens for the
southern soldiers; Grant provided no starvation for southern men; Grant
provided no “dead-lines” upon which to shoot southern soldiers if they
crossed them; Grant provided no outrageous punishment against these
people that now call him a tyrant. Generous to a fault in all his
actions toward the men who were fighting his country and destroying the
constitution, that man to-day is denounced as a very Cæsar!

Sherman has not been denounced, but the only reason is that he was not
one of the actors in this transaction; but I want now to say to my
friends on the other side, especially to my friend from Delaware, who
repeated his bitter denunciation against Sheridan yesterday—and I say
this in all kindness, because I am speaking what future history will
bear me out in—when Sheridan and Grant and Sherman, and others like
them, are forgotten in this country, you will have no country. When the
democratic party is rotten for centuries in its grave, the life, the
course, the conduct of these men will live as bright as the noonday sun
in the heart of every patriot of a republic like the American Union.
Sirs, you may talk about tyranny, you may talk about oppression, you may
denounce these men; their glory may fade into the darkness of night; but
that darkness will be a brilliant light compared with the darkness of
the democratic party. Their pathway is illuminated by glory; yours by
dark deeds against the Government. That is a difference which the
country will bear witness to in future history when speaking of this
country and the actors on its stage.

Now, Mr. President, I have a word to say about our duty. A great many
people are asking, what shall we do? Plain and simple in my judgment is
the proposition. I say to republicans, do not be scared. No man is ever
hurt by doing an honest act and performing a patriotic duty. If we are
to have a war of words outside or inside, let us have them in truth and
soberness, but in earnest. What then is our duty? I did not believe that
in 1872 there were official data upon which we could decide who was
elected governor of Louisiana. But this is not the point of my argument.
It is that the President has recognized Kellogg as governor of that
State, and he has acted for two years. The Legislature of the State has
recognized him; the supreme court of the State has recognized him; one
branch of Congress has recognized him. The duty is plain, and that is
for this, the other branch of Congress, to do it, and that settles the
question. Then, when it does it, your duty is plain and simple, and as
the President has told you, he will perform his without fear, favor, or
affection. Recognize the government that revolution has been against and
intended to overthrow, and leave the President to his duty, and he will
do it. That is what to do.

Sir, we have been told that this old craft is rapidly going to pieces;
that the angry waves of dissension in the land are lashing against her
sides. We are told that she is sinking, sinking, sinking to the bottom
of the political ocean. Is that true? Is it true that this gallant old
party, that this gallant old ship that has sailed through troubled seas
before is going to be stranded now upon the rock of fury that has been
set up by a clamor in this Chamber and a few newspapers in the country?
Is it true that the party that saved this country in all its great
crises, in all its great trials, is sinking to-day on account of its
fear and trembling before an inferior enemy? I hope not. I remember,
sir, once I was told that the old republican ship was gone; but when I
steadied myself on the shores bounding the political ocean of strife and
commotion, I looked afar off and there I could see a vessel bounding the
boisterous billows with white sails unfurled, marked on her sides
“Freighted with the hopes of mankind,” while the great Mariner above, as
her helmsman, steered her, navigated her to a haven of rest, of peace,
and of safety. You have but to look again upon that broad ocean of
political commotion to-day, and the time will soon come when the same
old craft, provided with the same cargo, will be seen, flying the same
flag, passing through these tempestuous waves, anchoring herself at the
shores of honesty and justice, and there she will lie undisturbed by
strife and tumult, again in peace and safety. [Manifestations of
applause in the galleries.]

               Speech of Hon. James G. Blaine, of Maine,

  _On the False Issue raised by the Democratic Party, Delivered in the
         Senate of the United States, Monday, April 14, 1879_.

The Senate having under consideration the bill (H. R. No. 1,) making
appropriations for the support of the Army for the fiscal year ending
June 30, 1880, and for other purposes—

Mr. Blaine said:

Mr. PRESIDENT: The existing section of the Revised Statutes numbered
2002 reads thus:

No military or naval officer, or other person engaged in the civil,
military, or naval service of the United States, shall order, bring,
keep or have under his authority or control, any troops or armed men at
the place where any general or special election is held in any State,
unless it be necessary to repel the armed enemies of the United States,
_or to keep the peace at the polls_.

The object of the proposed section, which has just been read at the
Clerk’s desk, is to get rid of the eight closing words, namely, “or to
keep the peace at the polls,” and therefore the mode of legislation
proposed in the Army bill now before the Senate is an unusual mode; it
is an extraordinary mode. If you want to take off a single sentence at
the end of a section in the Revised Statutes the ordinary way is to
strike off those words, but the mode chosen in this bill is to repeat
and re-enact the whole section leaving those few words out. While I do
not wish to be needlessly suspicious on a small point I am quite
persuaded that this did not happen by accident but that it came by
design. If I may so speak it came of cunning, the intent being to create
the impression that whereas the republicans in the administration of the
General Government had been using troops right and left, hither and
thither, in every direction, as soon as the democrats got power they
enacted this section. I can imagine democratic candidates for Congress
all over the country reading this section to gaping and listening
audiences as one of the first offsprings of democratic reform, whereas
every word of it, every syllable of it, from its first to its last, is
the enactment of a republican Congress.

I repeat that this unusual form presents a dishonest issue, whether so
intended or not. It presents the issue that as soon as the democrats got
possession of the Federal Government they proceeded to enact the clause
which is thus expressed. The law was passed by a republican Congress in
1865. There were forty-six Senators sitting in this Chamber at that
time, of whom only ten or at most eleven were democrats. The House of
Representatives was overwhelmingly republican. We were in the midst of a
war. The republican administration had a million or possibly twelve
hundred thousand bayonets at its command. Thus circumstanced and thus
surrounded, with the amplest possible power to interfere with elections
had they so designed, with soldiers in every hamlet and county of the
United States, the republican party themselves placed that provision on
the statute book, and Abraham Lincoln, their President, signed it.

I beg you to observe, Mr. President, that this is the first instance in
the legislation of the United States in which any restrictive clause
whatever was put upon the statute book in regard to the use of troops at
the polls. The republican party did it with the Senate and the House in
their control. Abraham Lincoln signed it when he was Commander-in-Chief
of an army larger than ever Napoleon Bonaparte had at his command. So
much by way of correcting an ingenious and studied attempt at
misrepresentation.

The alleged object is to strike out the few words that authorize the use
of troops to keep peace at the polls. This country has been alarmed, I
rather think indeed amused, at the great effort made to create a
widespread impression that the republican party relies for its popular
strength upon the use of the bayonet. This democratic Congress has
attempted to give a bad name to this country throughout the civilized
world, and to give it on a false issue. They have raised an issue that
has no foundation in fact—that is false in whole and detail, false in
the charge, false in all the specifications. That impression sought to
be created, as I say, not only throughout the North American continent
but in Europe to-day, is that elections are attempted in this country to
be controlled by the bayonet.

I denounce it here as a false issue. I am not at liberty to say that any
gentleman making this issue knows it to be false; I hope he does not;
but I am going to prove to him that it is false, and that there is not a
solitary inch of solid earth on which to rest the foot of any man who
makes that issue. I have in my hand an official transcript of the
location and the number of all the troops of the United States east of
Omaha. By “east of Omaha,” I mean all the United States east of the
Mississippi river and that belt of States that border the Mississippi
river on the west, including forty-one million at least out of the
forty-five million of people that this country is supposed to contain
to-day. In that magnificent area, I will not pretend to state its
extent, but with forty-one million people, how many troops of the United
States are there to-day? Would any Senator on the opposite side like to
guess, or would he like to state how many men with muskets in their
hands there are in the vast area I have named? There are two thousand
seven hundred and ninety-seven! And not one more.

From the headwaters of the Mississippi River to the lakes, and down the
great chain of lakes, and down the Saint Lawrence and down the valley of
the Saint John and down the St. Croix striking the Atlantic Ocean and
following it down to Key West, around the Gulf, up to the mouth of the
Mississippi again, a frontier of eight thousand miles either bordering
on the ocean or upon foreign territory is guarded by these troops.
Within this domain forty-five fortifications are manned and eleven
arsenals protected. There are sixty troops to every million of people.
In the South I have the entire number in each State, and will give it.

And the entire South has eleven hundred and fifty-five soldiers to
intimidate, overrun, oppress and destroy the liberties of fifteen
million people! In the Southern States there are twelve hundred and
three counties. If you distribute the soldiers there is not quite one
for each county; and when I give the counties I give them from the
census of 1870. If you distribute them territorially there is one for
every seven hundred square miles of territory, so that if you make a
territorial distribution, I would remind the honorable Senator from
Delaware, if I saw him in his seat, that the quota for his State would
be three—“one ragged sergeant and two abreast,” as the old song has it.
[Laughter.] That is the force ready to destroy the liberties of
Delaware!

Mr. President, it was said, as the old maxim has it, that the
soothsayers of Rome could not look each other in the face without
smiling. There are not two democratic Senators on this floor who can go
into the cloak-room and look each other in the face without smiling at
this talk, or, more appropriately, I should say without blushing—the
whole thing is such a prodigious and absolute farce, such a miserably
manufactured false issue, such a pretense without the slightest
foundation in the world, and talked about most and denounced the loudest
in States that have not and have not had a single Federal soldier. In
New England we have three hundred and eighty soldiers. Throughout the
South it does not run quite seventy to the million people. In New
England we have absolutely one hundred and twenty soldiers to the
million. New England is far more overrun to-day by the Federal soldier,
immensely more, than the whole South is. I never heard anybody complain
about it in New England, or express any great fear of his liberties
being endangered by the presence of a handful of troops.

As I have said, the tendency of this talk is to give us a bad name in
Europe. Republican institutions are looked upon there with jealousy.
Every misrepresentation, every slander is taken up and exaggerated and
talked about to our discredit, and the democratic party of the country
to-day stand indicted, and I here indict them, for public slander of
their country, creating the impression in the civilized world that we
are governed by a ruthless military despotism. I wonder how amazing it
would be to any man in Europe, familiar as Europeans are with great
armies, if he were told that over a territory larger than France and
Spain and Portugal and Great Britain and Holland and Belgium and the
German Empire all combined, there were but eleven hundred and fifty-five
soldiers! That is all this democratic howl, this mad cry, this false
issue, this absurd talk is based on—the presence of eleven hundred and
fifty-five soldiers on eight hundred and fifty thousand square miles of
territory, not double the number of the democratic police in the city of
Baltimore, not a third of the police in the city of New York, not double
the democratic police in the city of New Orleans. I repeat, the number
indicts them; it stamps the whole cry as without any foundation; it
derides the issue as a false and scandalous and partisan makeshift.

What then is the real motive underlying this movement? Senators on that
side, democratic orators on the stump cannot make any sensible set of
men at the crossroads believe that they are afraid of eleven hundred and
fifty-five soldiers distributed one to each county in the South. The
minute you state that, everybody sees the utter, palpable and laughable
absurdity of it, and therefore we must go further and find a motive for
all this cry. We want to find out, to use a familiar and vulgar phrase,
what is “the cat under the meal.” It is not the troops. That is evident.
There are more troops by fifty per cent. scattered through the Northern
States east of the Mississippi to-day than through the Southern States
east of the Mississippi, and yet nobody in the North speaks of it;
everybody would be laughed at for speaking of it; and therefore the
issue, I take no risk in stating, I make bold to declare, that this
issue on the troops, being a false one, being one without foundation,
conceals the true issue, which is simply to get rid of the Federal
presence at Federal elections, to get rid of the _civil power of the
United States_ in the election of Representatives to the Congress of the
United States. That is the whole of it; and disguise it as you may there
is nothing else in it or of it.

You simply want to get rid of the supervision by the Federal Government
of the election of Representatives to Congress through civil means; and
therefore this bill connects itself directly with another bill, and you
cannot discuss this military bill without discussing a bill which we had
before us last winter, known as the legislative, executive, and judicial
appropriation bill. I am quite well aware, I profess to be as well aware
as any one, that it is not permissible for me to discuss a bill that is
pending before the other House. I am quite well aware that propriety and
parliamentary rule forbid that I should speak of what is done in the
House of Representatives; but I know very well that I am not forbidden
to speak of that which is not done in the House of Representatives. I am
quite free to speak of the things that are not done there, and therefore
I am free to declare that neither this military bill nor the
legislative, executive, and judicial appropriation bill ever emanated
from any committee of the House of Representatives at all; they are not
the work of any committee of the House of Representatives, and, although
the present House of Representatives is almost evenly balanced in party
division, no solitary suggestion has been allowed to come from the
minority of that House in regard to the shaping of these bills. Where do
they come from? We are not left to infer; we are not even left to the
Yankee privilege of guessing, because we know. The Senator from Kentucky
[MR. BECK] obligingly told us—I have his exact words here—“that the
honorable Senator from Ohio [MR. THURMAN] was the chairman of a
committee appointed by the democratic party to see how it was best to
present all these questions before us.”

We are told, too, rather a novel thing, that if we do not take these
laws, we are not to have the appropriations. I believe it has been
announced in both branches of Congress, I suppose on the authority of
the democratic caucus, that if we do not take these bills as they are
planned, we shall not have any of the appropriations that go with them.
The honorable Senator from West Virginia [Mr. HEREFORD] told it to us on
Friday; the honorable Senator from Ohio [Mr. THURMAN] told it to us last
session; the honorable Senator from Kentucky [Mr. BECK] told it to us at
the same time, and I am not permitted to speak of the legions who told
us so in the other House. They say all these appropriations are to be
refused—not merely the Army appropriation, for they do not stop at that.
Look for a moment at the legislative bill that came from the democratic
caucus. Here is an appropriation in it for defraying the expenses of the
Supreme Court and the circuit and district courts of the United States,
including the District of Columbia, &c., $2,800,000: “Provided”—provided
what?

That the following sections of the Revised Statutes relating to
elections—going on to recite them—be repealed.

That is, you will pass an appropriation for the support of the judiciary
of the United States only on condition of this repeal. We often speak of
this government being divided between three great departments, the
executive, the legislative, and the judicial—co-ordinate, independent,
equal. The legislative, under the control of a democratic caucus, now
steps forward and says, “We offer to the Executive this bill, and if he
does not sign it, we are going to starve the judiciary.” That is
carrying the thing a little further than I have ever known. We do not
merely propose to starve the Executive if he will not sign the bill, but
we propose to starve the judiciary that has had nothing whatever to do
with the question. That has been boldly avowed on this floor; that has
been boldly avowed in the other House; that has been boldly avowed in
democratic papers throughout the country.

And you propose not merely to starve the judiciary but you propose that
you will not appropriate a solitary dollar to take care of this Capitol.
The men who take care of this great amount of public property are
provided for in that bill. You say they shall not have any pay if the
President will not agree to change the election laws. There is the
public printing that goes on for the enlightenment of the whole country
and for printing the public documents of every one of the Departments.
You say they shall not have a dollar for public printing unless the
President agrees to repeal these laws.

There is the Congressional Library that has become the pride of the
whole American people for its magnificent growth and extent. You say it
shall not have one dollar to take care of it, much less add a new book,
unless the President signs these bills. There is the Department of State
that we think throughout the history of the Government has been a great
pride to this country for the ability with which it has conducted our
foreign affairs; it is also to be starved. You say we shall not have any
intercourse with foreign nations, not a dollar shall be appropriated
therefor unless the President signs these bills. There is the
Light-House Board that provides for the beacons and the warnings on
seventeen thousand miles of sea and gulf and lake coast.

You say those lights shall all go out and not a dollar shall be
appropriated for the board if the President does not sign these bills.
There are the mints of the United States at Philadelphia, New Orleans,
Denver, San Francisco, coining silver and coining gold—not a dollar
shall be appropriated for them if the President does not sign these
bills. There is the Patent Office, the patents issued which embody the
invention of the country—not a dollar for them. The Pension Bureau shall
cease its operations unless these bills are signed and patriotic
soldiers may starve. The Agricultural Bureau, the Post Office
Department, every one of the great executive functions of the Government
is threatened, taken by the throat, highwayman-style, collared on the
highway, commanded to stand and deliver in the name of the democratic
congressional caucus. That is what it is; simply that. No committee of
this Congress in either branch has ever recommended that legislation—not
one. Simply a democratic caucus has done it.

Of course this is new. We are learning something every day. I think you
may search the records of the Federal Government in vain; it will take
some one much more industrious in that search than I have ever been, and
much more observant than I have ever been, to find any possible parallel
or any possible suggestion in our past history of any such thing. Most
of the Senators who sit in this Chamber can remember some vetoes by
Presidents that shook this country to its centre with excitement. The
veto of the national-bank bill by Jackson in 1832, remembered by the
oldest in this Chamber; the veto of the national-bank bill in 1841 by
Tyler, remembered by those not the oldest, shook this country with a
political excitement which up to that time had scarcely a parallel; and
it was believed, whether rightfully or wrongfully is no matter, it was
believed by those who advocated those financial measures at the time,
that they were of the very last importance to the well-being and
prosperity of the people of the Union. That was believed by the great
and shining lights of that day. It was believed by that man of imperial
character and imperious will, the great Senator from Kentucky. It was
believed by Mr. Webster, the greatest of New England Senators. When
Jackson vetoed the one or Tyler vetoed the other, did you ever hear a
suggestion that those bank charters should be put on appropriation bills
or that there should not be a dollar to run the Government until they
were signed? So far from it that, in 1841, when temper was at its
height; when the whig party, in addition to losing their great measure,
lost it under the sting and the irritation of what they believed was a
desertion by the President whom they had chosen; and when Mr. Clay,
goaded by all these considerations, rose to debate the question in the
Senate, he repelled the suggestion of William C. Rives, of Virginia, who
attempted to make upon him the point that he had indulged in some threat
involving the independence of the Executive. Mr. Clay rose to his full
height and thus responded:

  “I said nothing whatever of any obligation on the part of the
  President to conform his judgment to the opinions of the Senate and
  the House of Representatives, although the Senator argued as if I had,
  and persevered in so arguing after repeated correction. I said no such
  thing. I know and I respect the perfect independence of each
  department, acting within its proper sphere, of the other
  departments.”

A leading democrat, an eloquent man, a man who has courage and frankness
and many good qualities, has boasted publicly that the democracy are in
power for the first time in eighteen years, and they do not intend to
stop until they have wiped out every vestige of every war measure. Well,
“forewarned is forearmed,” and you begin appropriately on a measure that
has the signature of Abraham Lincoln. I think the picture is a striking
one when you hear these words from a man who was then in arms against
the Government of the United States, doing his best to destroy it,
exerting every power given him in a bloody and terrible rebellion
against the authority of the United States and when Abraham Lincoln was
marching at the same time to his martyrdom in its defense! Strange times
have fallen upon us that those of us who had the great honor to be
associated in higher or lower degree with Mr. Lincoln in the
administration of the Government should live to hear men in public life
and on the floors of Congress, fresh from the battle-fields of the
rebellion, threatening the people of the United States that the
democratic party, in power for the first time in eighteen years,
proposes not to stay its hand until every vestige of the war measures
has been wiped out! the late vice-president of the confederacy
boasted—perhaps I had better say stated—that for sixty out of the
seventy-two years preceding the outbreak of the rebellion, from the
foundation of the Government, the South, though in a minority, had by
combining with what he termed the anti-centralists in the North ruled
the country; and in 1866 the same gentleman indicated in a speech, I
think before the Legislature of Georgia, that by a return to Congress
the South might repeat the experiment with the same successful result. I
read that speech at the time; but I little thought I should live to see
so near a fulfillment of its prediction. I see here to-day two great
measures emanating, as I have said, not from a committee of either
House, but from a democratic caucus in which the South has an
overwhelming majority, two-thirds in the House, and out of forty-two
Senators on the other side of this Chamber professing the democratic
faith thirty are from the South—twenty-three, a positive and pronounced
majority, having themselves been participants in the war against the
Union either in military or civil station. So that as a matter of fact,
plainly deducible from counting your fingers, the legislation of this
country to-day, shaped and fashioned in a democratic caucus where the
confederates of the South hold the majority, is the realization of Mr.
STEPHENS’ prophecy. And very appropriately the House under that control
and the Senate under that control, embodying thus the entire legislative
powers of the Government, deriving its political strength from the
South, elected from the South, say to the President of the United
States, at the head of the Executive Department of the Government,
elected as he was from the North—elected by the whole people, but
elected as a Northern man; elected on Republican principles, elected in
opposition to the party that controls both branches of Congress
to-day—they naturally say, “You shall not exercise your constitutional
power to veto a bill.”

Some gentleman may rise and say, “Do you call it revolution to put an
amendment on an appropriation bill?” Of course not. There have been a
great many amendments put on appropriation bills, some mischievous and
some harmless; but I call it the audacity of revolution for any Senator
or Representative, or any caucus of Senators or Representatives, to get
together and say, “We will have this legislation or we will stop the
great departments of the Government.” That is revolutionary. I do not
think it will amount to revolution; my opinion is it will not. I think
that is a revolution that will not go around; I think that is a
revolution which will not revolve; I think that is a revolution whose
wheel will not turn; but it is a revolution if persisted in, and if not
persisted in, it must be backed out from with ignominy. The democratic
party in Congress have put themselves exactly in this position to-day,
that if they go forward in the announced programme, they march to
revolution. I think they will, in the end, go back in an ignominious
retreat. That is my judgment.

The extent to which they control the legislation of the country is worth
pointing out. In round numbers, the Southern people are about one-third
of the population of the Union. I am not permitted to speak of the
organization of the House of Representatives, but I can refer to that of
the last House. In the last House of Representatives, of the forty-two
standing committees the South had twenty-five. I am not blaming the
honorable Speaker for it. He was hedged in by partisan forces, and could
not avoid it. In this very Senate, out of thirty-four standing
committees the South has twenty-two. I am not calling these things up
just now in reproach; I am only showing what an admirable prophet the
late vice-president of the Southern Confederacy was, and how entirely
true all his words have been, and how he has lived to see them realized.

I do not profess to know, Mr. President, least of all Senators on this
floor, certainly as little as any Senator on this floor, do I profess to
know, what the President of the United States will do when these bills
are presented to him, as I suppose in due course of time they will be. I
certainly should never speak a solitary word of disrespect of the
gentleman holding that exalted position, and I hope I should not speak a
word unbefitting the dignity of the office of a Senator of the United
States. But as there has been speculation here and there on both sides
as to what he would do, it seems to me that the dead heroes of the Union
would rise from their graves if he should consent to be intimidated and
outraged in his proper constitutional powers by threats like these.

All the war measures of Abraham Lincoln are to be wiped out, say leading
democrats! The Bourbons of France busied themselves, I believe, after
the restoration, in removing every trace of Napoleon’s power and
grandeur, even chiseling the “N” from public monuments raised to
perpetuate his glory; but the dead man’s hand from Saint Helena reached
out and destroyed them in their pride and in their folly. And I tell the
Senators on the other side of this Chamber,—I tell the democratic party
North and South—South in the lead and North following,—that, the slow,
unmoving finger of scorn, from the tomb of the martyred President on the
prairies of Illinois, will wither and destroy them. Though dead he
speaketh. [Great applause in the galleries.]

The presiding officer, (Mr. ANTHONY in the chair.) The Sergeant-at-Arms
will preserve order in the galleries and arrest persons manifesting
approbation or disapprobation.

Mr. BLAINE. When you present these bills with these threats to the
living President, who bore the commission of Abraham Lincoln and served
with honor in the Army of the Union, which Lincoln restored and
preserved, I can think only of one appropriate response from his lips or
his pen. He should say to you with all the scorn befitting his station:

  Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?

                       Speech of Roscoe Conkling.

 _On the Extra Session of 1879. What it Teaches and what it Means. In the
              Senate of the United States, April 24, 1879._

The Senate having under consideration the bill (H. R. No. 1) making
appropriations for the support of the Army for the fiscal year ending
June 30, 1880, and for other purposes—

Mr. CONKLING said:

Mr. PRESIDENT: During the last fiscal year the amount of national taxes
paid into the Treasury was $234,831,461.77. Of this sum one hundred and
thirty million and a fraction was collected under tariff laws as duties
on imported merchandise, and one hundred and four million and a fraction
as tax on American productions. Of this total of $235,000,000 in round
numbers, twenty-seven States which adhered to the Union during the
recent war paid $221,204,268.88. The residue came from eleven States. I
will read their names: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana,
Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia.
These eleven States paid $13,627,192.89. Of this sum more than six
million and a half came from the tobacco of Virginia. Deducting the
amount of the tobacco tax in Virginia, the eleven States enumerated paid
$7,125,462.60 of the revenues and supplies of the Republic.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. Will the Senator from New York allow me to ask him
a question?

Mr. CONKLING. If the Senator thinks that two of us are needed to make a
statement of figures I will.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. Two no doubt can make it better.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Does the Senator from New York yield to the
Senator from Georgia?

Mr. CONKLING. After the expressed opinion of the Senator from Georgia
that the statement needs his aid, I cannot decline.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. I will not interrupt the Senator if it is
disagreeable to him, I assure him. I ask if in the computation he has
made of the amount paid he does not ascribe to the States that adhered
to the Union, to use his language, all——

Mr. CONKLING. Having heard the Senator so far, I must ask him to desist.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York declines to yield
further.

Mr. CONKLING. I have stated certain figures as they appear in the
published official accounts: the Senator seems about to challenge the
process or system by which the accounts are made up. I cannot give way
for this, and must beg him to allow me to proceed with observations
which I fear to prolong lest they become too wearisome to the Senate.

The laws exacting these few millions from eleven States, and these
hundreds of millions from twenty-seven States, originated, as the
Constitution requires all bills for raising revenue to originate, in the
House of Representatives. They are not recent laws. They have been
approved and affirmed by succeeding Congresses. The last House of
Representatives and its predecessor approved them, and both these Houses
were ruled by a democratic Speaker, by democratic committees, and by a
democratic majority. Both Senate and House are democratic now, and we
hear of no purpose to repeal or suspend existing revenue laws. They are
to remain in full force. They will continue to operate and to take
tribute of the people. If the sum they exact this year and next year,
shall be less than last year, it will be only or chiefly because recent
legislation favoring southern and tobacco-growing regions has dismissed
twelve or fourteen million of annual tax on tobacco.

This vast revenue is raised and to be raised for three uses. It is
supplied in time of severe depression and distress, to pay debt
inflicted by rebellion; to pay pensions to widows, orphans, and cripples
made by rebellion; and to maintain the Government and enforce the laws
preserved at inestimable cost of life and treasure.

It can be devoted to its uses in only one mode. Once in the Treasury, it
must remain there useless until appropriated by act of Congress. The
Constitution so ordains. To collect it, and then defeat or prevent its
object or use, would be recreant and abominable oppression.

The Constitution leaves no discretion to Congress whether needful
appropriations shall be made. Discretion to ascertain and determine
amounts needful, is committed to Congress, but the appropriation of
whatever is needful after the amount has been ascertained, is commanded
positively and absolutely. When, for example, the Constitution declares
that the President and the judges at stated periods shall receive
compensation fixed by law, the duty to make the appropriations is plain
and peremptory; to refuse to make them, is disobedience of the
Constitution, and treasonable. So, when it is declared that Congress
shall have power to provide money to pay debts, and for the common
defense and the general welfare, the plain meaning is that Congress
shall do these things, and a refusal to do them is revolutionary, and
subversive of the Constitution. A refusal less flagrant would be
impeachable in the case of every officer and department of the
Government within the reach of impeachment. Were the President to refuse
to do any act enjoined on him by the Constitution, he would be
impeachable, and ought to be convicted and removed from office as a
convict. Should the judges, one, or some, or all of them, refuse to
perform any duty which the Constitution commits to the judicial branch,
the refusal would be plainly impeachable.

Congress is not amenable to impeachment. Congressional majorities are
triable at the bar of public opinion, and in no other human forum. Could
Congress be dissolved instantly here as in England, could Senators and
Representatives be driven instantly from their seats by popular
disapproval, were they amenable presently somewhere, there would be more
of bravery, if not less of guilt, in a disregard of sworn obligation.
Legislators are bound chiefly by their honor and their oaths; and the
very impunity and exemption they enjoy exalts and measures their
obligations, and the crime and odium of violating them. Because of the
fixed tenure by which the members of each House hold their places and
their trusts, irreparable harm may come of their acts any omissions,
before they can be visited with even political defeat, and before the
wrong they do can be undone. A congressional majority is absolutely safe
during its term, and those who suffered such impunity to exist in the
frame of our Government, must have relied on the enormity and turpitude
of the act to deter the representatives of the people and the
representatives of States from betraying a trust so exalted and so
sacred as their offices imply.

Mr. President, it does not escape my attention, as it must occur to
those around me, that in ordinary times obvious aphorisms, I might say
truisms like these would be needless, if not out of place in the Senate.
They are pertinent now because of an occasion without example in
American history. I know of no similar instance in British history.
Could one be found, it would only mark the difference between an
hereditary monarchy without a written constitution, and a free republic
with a written charter plainly defining from the beginning the powers,
the rights, and the duties of every department of the Government. The
nearest approaches in English experience to the transactions which now
menace this country, only gild with broad light the wisdom of those who
established a system to exempt America forever from the struggles
between kingcraft and liberty, between aristocratic pretensions and
human rights, which in succeeding centuries had checkered and begrimed
the annals of Great Britain. It was not to transplant, but to leave
behind and shut out the usurpations and prerogatives of kings, nobles,
and gentry, and the rude and violent resorts which, with varying and
only partial success, had been matched against them, that wise and
far-seeing men of many nationalities came to these shores and founded “a
government of the people, for the people, and by the people.” Such
boisterous conflicts as the Old World had witnessed between subjects and
rulers—between privilege and right, were the warnings which our fathers
heeded, the dangers which they shunned, the evils which they averted,
the disasters which they made impossible so long as their posterity
should cherish their inheritance.

Until now no madness of party, no audacity or desperation of sinister,
sectional, or partisan design, has ever ventured on such an attempt as
has recently come to pass in the two Houses of Congress. The proceeding
I mean to characterize, if misunderstood anywhere, is misunderstood
here. One listening to addresses delivered to the Senate during this
debate, as it is called, must think that the majority is arraigned,
certainly that the majority wishes to seem and is determined to seem
arraigned, merely for insisting that provisions appropriating money to
keep the Government alive, and provisions not in themselves improper
relating to other matters, may be united in the same bill. With somewhat
of monotonous and ostentatious iteration we have been asked whether
incorporating general legislation in appropriation bills is revolution,
or revolutionary? No one in my hearing has ever so contended.

Each House is empowered by the Constitution to make rules governing the
modes of its own procedure. The rules permitting, I know of nothing
except convenience, common sense, and the danger of log-rolling
combinations, which forbids putting all the appropriations into one
bill, and in the same bill, all the revenue laws, a provision admitting
a State into the Union, another paying a pension to a widow, another
changing the name of a steamboat. The votes and the executive approval
which would make one of these provisions a law, would make them all a
law. The proceeding would be outlandish, but it would not violate the
Constitution.

A Senator might vote against such a huddle of incongruities, although
separately he would approve each one of them. If, however, they passed
both Houses in a bunch, and the Executive found no objection to any
feature of the bill on its merits, and the only criticism should be that
it would have been better legislative practice to divide it into
separate enactments, it is not easy to see on what ground a veto could
stand.

The assault which has been made on the executive branch of the
Government and on the Constitution itself, would not be less flagrant if
separate bills had been resorted to as the weapons of attack. Suppose in
a separate bill, the majority had, in advance of the appropriations,
repealed the national-bank act and the resumption act, and had declared
that unless the Executive surrendered his convictions and yielded up his
approval of the repealing act, no appropriations should be made; would
the separation of the bills have palliated or condoned the revolutionary
purpose? In the absence of an avowal that appropriations were to be
finally withheld, or that appropriations were to be made to hinge upon
the approval or veto of something else, a resort to separate bills might
have cloaked and secreted for a time the real meaning of the
transaction. In that respect it would have been wise and artful to
resort to separate bills on this occasion; and I speak, I think, in the
hearing of at least one democratic Senator who did not overlook in
advance the suggestion now made. But when it was declared, or intended,
that unless another species of legislation is agreed to, the money of
the people, paid for that purpose, shall not be used to maintain their
Government and to enforce the laws—when it is designed that the
Government shall be thrown into confusion and shall stop unless private
charity or public succor comes to its relief, the threat is
revolutionary, and its execution is treasonable.

In the case before us, the design to make appropriations hinge and
depend upon the destruction of certain laws is plain on the face of the
bills before us,—the bill now pending, and another one on our tables.
The same design was plain on the face of the bills sent us at the last
session. The very fact that the sections uncovering the ballot-box to
violence and fraud, are not, and never have been separately presented,
but are thrust into appropriation bills, discloses and proves a belief,
if not a knowledge, that in a separate bill the Executive would not
approve them. Moreover both Houses have rung with the assertion that the
Executive would not approve in a separate measure the overthrow of
existing safeguards of the ballot-box, and that should he refuse to give
his approval to appropriations and an overthrow of those safeguards
linked together, no appropriations should be made.

The plot and the purpose then, is by duress to compel the Executive to
give up his convictions, his duty, and his oath, as the price to be paid
a political party for allowing the Government to live! Whether the bills
be united or divided, is mere method and form. The substance in either
form is the same, and the plot if persisted in will bury its aiders and
abettors in opprobrium, and will leave a buoy on the sea of time warning
political mariners to keep aloof from a treacherous channel in which a
political party foundered and went down.

The size of the Army and its pay, have both been exactly fixed by law—by
law enacted by a democratic House, and approved by a second democratic
House. It has been decided and voted that the coast defenses and the
Indian and frontier service, require a certain number of soldiers; and
the appropriations needed for provision and pay have been ascertained to
a farthing. Nothing remains to be done, but to give formal sanction and
warrant for the use of the money from time to time. This was all true at
the last session. But a democratic House, or more justly speaking the
democratic majority in the House refused to give its sanction, refused
to allow the people’s money, to reach the use for which the people paid
it, unless certain long-standing laws were repealed. When the Senate
voted against the repeal, we were bluntly told that unless that vote was
reversed, unless the Senate and the Executive would accept the bills,
repealing clauses and all, the session should die, no appropriations
should be made, and the wheels of the Government should stop. The threat
was executed; the session did die, and every branch of the Government
was left without the power to execute its duties after the 30th of next
June.

We were further told that when the extra session, thus to be brought
about, should convene, the democrats would rule both Houses, that the
majority would again insist on its terms, and that then unless the
Executive submitted to become an accomplice in the design to fling down
the barriers that block the way to the ballot-box against fraud and
force, appropriations would again be refused, and again the session
should die leaving the Government paralyzed. The extra session has
convened; the democrats have indeed the power in both Houses, and thus
far the war and the caucus have come up to the manifesto. So far the
exploit has been easy. The time of trial is to come; the issue has been
made, and of its ignominious failure, there can be no doubt if the
Executive shall plant itself on constitutional right and duty, and stand
firm. The actors in this scheme have managed themselves and their party
into a predicament, and unless the President lets them out they will and
they must back out. [Laughter, and manifestations of applause in the
galleries.]

Should the Executive interpose the constitutional shield against the
political enormities of the proposed bills, and then should the majority
carry out the threat to desert their posts by adjournment without making
the needed appropriations, I hope and trust they will be called back
instantly and called back as often as need be until they relinquish a
monstrous pretension and abandon a treasonable position.

The Army bill now pending, is not, in its political features, the bill
tendered us at the last session a few days ago; it is not the same bill
then insisted on as the ultimatum of the majority. The bill as it comes
to us now, condemns its predecessor as crude and objectionable. It was
found to need alteration. It did need alteration badly, and those who
lately insisted on it as it was, insist on it now as it then was not. A
grave proviso has been added to save the right of the President to aid a
State gasping in the throes of rebellion or invasion and calling for
help. As the provision stood when thrust upon us first and last at the
recent session, it would have punished as a felon the President of the
United States, the General of the Army, and others, for attempting to
obey the Constitution of the United States and two ancient acts of
Congress, one of them signed by George Washington. Shorn of this
absurdity, the bill as it now stands, should it become a law, will be
the first enactment of its kind that ever found its way into the
statutes of the United States. A century, with all its activities and
party strifes, with all its passionate discords, with all its expedients
for party advantage, with all its wisdom and its folly, with all its
patriotism and its treason, has never till now produced a congressional
majority which deemed such a statute fit to be enacted.

Let me state the meaning of the amendments proposed under guise of
enlarging liberty on election day—that day of days when order, peace,