purposely reduced in value, but kept at par with gold by limiting its amount, or otherwise.

Now, sir, it is perfectly obvious that, if we could in some way prevent gold and silver from fluctuating in value in their relations to each other, the double standard is the best, as giving the largest store of the precious metals to draw upon; and it is now proposed, by international treaties, to agree upon the relative value of these metals. In the absence of such treaties, it is far wiser for us to stand by the composite system, in force in the United States since 1853; and such is the basis of the report of the Committee on Finance. We propose to retain, as now, the ultimate unit of gold, in connection with a subsidiary silver coinage, including the silver dollar; to limit the legal-tender quality of such subsidiary coinage; and to provide that the amount to be issued shall not exceed that of the sinking fund. The amendments offered propose the adoption of the bimetallic system, with all its uncertainties, at a time when it has been rejected, or is being rejected, by all commercial nations; and especially at a time when the difference between silver and gold is greater than it has been for two hundred years. The quantity of silver required under the propositions of the Committee will be amply supplied through our domestic production and the sinking fund; while the amendments offered will bring to us for a market the rejected silver of Germany and Europe, and will demonetize gold, not only between individuals, but in payments made to the custom-house and to the public creditors.

The time for this proposed radical change in our coinage is a truly unfortunate one. The margin between gold and silver is now about ten per cent. greater than the rate of 16 to 1 fixed by law. Nothing is clearer than that, under the bimetallic system, the legal relation be tween the two metals should be as nearly as practicable the market relation. This is the theory of the system. The first step, therefore, in adopting the new system should be to fix the legal relation of silver to gold at 17 to 1. But this step would defeat the primary object of making the present depreciation of silver the means of a voluntary resumption of the specie standard. By the composite system this object can be easily accomplished, and may be heartily accepted by all classes, without contraction or expansion of our currency.

Sir, without going further into this argument, already too greatly protracted, I appeal to Senators charged with high duties at a critical period of our financial history, not to press upon us extreme opinions, but to hold fast to the progress we have made, and let us seize the opportunity offered us to make easy and straight the path now opened for a specie standard, when gold and silver and notes-all alike of equal value will circulate side by side, and revive again the flagging industry and enterprise of our people. To the one side I say that, if this bill does not give you all the silver you want, it will in three years' time give you all that will circulate at par with gold. To the other side I say that, if this bill does not assure resumption in gold, it does provide for resumption in silver, which the present law does not, and that it moreover prepares the way for resumption in gold by laying a foundation of silver coin, without which gold coin will never circulate, and

never has circulated, in any country of the world. Let us lay the foundation first, and the superstructure will come in due time. Both metals are indispensable, but silver first. It is the granite rock of the money superstructure. Let us lay well this foundation, and in due time the golden dome will crown our work, and United States notes, redeemable in gold and silver at the choice and demand of the holder, will be the winged Mercury to do the business, and promote the exchange of the products of human industry. Though the work is a great one, and the difficulties in the way greater than Bunyan's pilgrim encountered, I will not surrender my hope to see it accomplished.

DANGERS OF THE RESTORATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY TO POWER.

AT MARIETTA, OHIO, AUGUST 12, 1876.

FELLOW CITIZENS: We are engaged in a political canvass that will determine not only who shall be President of the United States for the next four years, but the policy and principles that will guide his administration. The contest will affect in a greater or less degree every citizen of the United States. The choice is between the Republican and the Democratic parties. The real question is, Shall the Democratic party be restored to power again, not with new principles and leaders, but the Democratic party, composed of the same elements as before the war? Sixteen years have passed away, and yet that party, in soul, purpose, and policy, is the same as when at the close of Buchanan's term it left the country crumbling into anarchy-a part warring against it, and a part voting against it, and both factions teaching that it was a mere confederation of States, too weak to enforce its own laws, without power to protect its life, and subject to the veto of any State that chose to withdraw from its power.

Its only hope for success now, as then, is in a united South combined with factional and discordant elements in the North, including the war-rioters of New York, the Sons of Liberty of Indiana, and the thousands of men who follow its name without reason or principle. It is a union of the men in the North who, in 1864, declared the war a failure, and the rebels in the South who were then fighting to destroy the Union. The South is to bring to the alliance increased political power. Formerly its slaves were counted at three fifths of their number; now, as freemen, they are counted as other citizens; but, unlike other citizens, though invested by the Constitution with the rights of freemen, they are to be overawed and held down by violence and murder, and their political power is to be wielded against their known will. In the North the disloyal elements are to be reënforced by malcontents, produced by the inevitable discontents of political strife. Men disap

pointed in aspirations for office or ambition, or who exaggerate the faults and failings of a Republican administration, will unite with the Democratic party, and thus endanger all that we have won in our long struggle for national liberty and unity. I do not underrate the severity of the contest before us, but I come to you fully impressed with its dangers and invoke you to consider them.

What will be the result of the restoration of the Democratic party to power? The first result will be a severe check to the growth of Union sentiment-love of the Union. Since the Republican party came into power our country has made great advances in strength and unity as a nation. It was the fierce, patriotic fervor of the people of the Northern States, the love of the Union, the love of country, that, organized under the name of the Republican party, overcame in war and at the ballot-box the Democratic party and secured us union, liberty, and country. But for this the Democratic party would have completed its work; it would have divided our country into two confederacies, and planted the seeds of further division and anarchy. We would have had no broad country to love. Millions of men, women, and children would still be bought and sold as slaves. Our rivers and mountains and plains would have been divided by hostile lines. Hundreds of thousands of brave men gave their lives to defeat this policy; and, thank God, the Democratic party, North and South, both on the field of battle and at the ballot-box, was defeated, and as a result our country is one and indivisible. The Mississippi flows through its whole course, from its remotest source to the Gulf, under the flag of one country, and that our own. Thirty-eight States and eight Territories are united in one nation, and its authority to make and enforce the laws can no longer be denied. And now the very men who fought and voted to break up this Union, under the same name and organization, still calling itself Democratic, appeal to your generosity to intrust to them all the great powers of the Government. They ask to administer its laws, control its revenues, and mold its policy at home and abroad. Both of their candidates, though living in the North, opposed every measure of the war, all the movements to organize the army that beat down the rebellion, and all the safeguards adopted to secure the results of our victory. The men they would bring into the chief places of the Government are those who led the rebel armies or who frowned and complained in the North. The same States that passed and supported ordinances of secession are the main strength of this coalition.

If they succeed they will have accomplished by a restoration what they sought to accomplish by a revolution. How will it read in history if it is recorded that the American people took up arms and overcame the Democratic party in order to save their Union, and when it was saved restored the same party and the same men to power again? Even the spectacle of such a contest is a reproach to our patriotism and civilization. Its success would have only one parallel in history, the restoration of Charles the Second in England after the people of England had beheaded his father and won their liberties under Cromwell. The people of England could get rid of their restoration only by another revolution; and we, by following their example, will involve our coun

try in a struggle as dangerous as the reigns of Charles the Second and James the Second were to the people of England. When the rebels begin to make laws for us we shall learn how dangerous it is to intrust our Union, our institutions, the liberty now enjoyed by all, to the custody and care of the very men who waged war against the Union, who sought to overthrow our institutions, and who held in slavery four millions of our countrymen made free by our policy.

The

But it may be said that these rebels are not the Democratic party, and it is the Democratic party that seeks to be restored to power. answer is that they would be the controlling element of the Democratic party-the majority of it-who would furnish the majority of the electoral votes for its success. Who controlled the Democratic party before the war? The very men who control it now. Why was it that tens of thousands of Northern Democrats swelled the ranks of the Republican party in 1860? Because they would not submit to the domination of the same elements that control that party now. who in the North will be their allies in this contest? Who are Tilden and Hendricks, and whom do they represent? The very men who held us in check and prolonged the war. The men who doubted, hesitated, wavered, and finally proposed to surrender in 1864, when our national life hung suspended by a thread.

But

But it is said there are brave men, patriotic men, and Union soldiers in the Democratic party. So there are; and to them I would appeal; to their memory of our danger and victory. How few are they in number; how feeble in influence in the Democratic party compared to the number and influence of those who during the war were open enemies or left-handed friends! Where is their place on the National Democratic ticket? What voice of inspiration comes to them from Tilden or Hendricks? Do they tell us that the Democratic party has reformed or repents? Where is the evidence of it? What principle does the Democratic party advocate now that it did not then? What has it done since 1860 to inspire confidence? We shall see after a while. No, fellow citizens, we have the self-same enemy to encounter, the same in heart, in purpose, and in principle, under the same name and organization, but they have dropped the rebel gray and assumed the Union blue.

As a foretaste of what is meant by a Democratic restoration, we have now a Democratic House of Representatives, where sixty men who served in the rebel army or rebel Congress are making laws for you. They are arraigning General Grant and other conspicuous leaders of the Union army. They have turned out Union soldiers who bear honorable wounds from petty offices to make room for rebel officers. They have passed a bill to make Confederate officers eligible for service in the army of the United States. The whole tone, conduct, and policy of these men are the same as when I was a member of the House sixteen years ago. They talk about the "revolution," but neither acknowledge its results nor respect the great changes in the Constitution which we hoped had been secured by the war. Let us see what will be the result if their power in the House is extended to the Senate and the Presidential office. When the war closed, innumer

able claims against the United States were made from the lately rebel States, and Congress in the most liberal spirit made provision for the payment of all that by the well-settled rules of civilized war could be properly made against the United States. The officers of the Departments, the Supreme Court, the Court of Claims, and the Southern Claims Commission were authorized to adjust and pay different classes of claims, and Congress passed many acts for equitable relief; so that it may with safety be said that more than $100,000,000 was paid after the war was over to citizens of the South for losses caused by the rebellion. But this extreme liberality only gave impetus to the presentation of claims against the United States which if allowed would double the national debt. These claims now endanger our whole financial system. I have here in my hand a list of one hundred and forty separate claims now pending in the Democratic House of Representatives, amounting to $1,582,269, every one of which is for injuries caused by our army in rebel States during the war. Here is another bill introduced in the Senate by Mr. Merrimon, of North Carolina, to revive the claims which existed in the South prior to April 13, 1861, in favor of persons "who promoted, encouraged, or in any manner sustained the late rebellion." These include postmasters, custom-house officers, and other agents of the Government, who at the beginning of the war paid over to the Confederate States the balances due from them to the United States.

At the close of the war, when every industry, employment, trade, and production of the loyal States was heavily taxed to meet the enormous cost of the war, Congress placed upon cotton a tax of three cents a pound. This produced from 1863 to 1868 the sum of $68,072,088, and was then repealed. It was substantially the only war tax paid by the South, when the aggregate taxes collected in the loyal States was still $400,000,000 a year. This tax was charged by the producer to the consumer when the cotton was sold, and was scarcely felt by the planter who raised the cotton. And yet every year since there has been a persistent demand for the refunding of this cotton tax, not to the men who paid it, but to the States in which it was paid; and as sure as fate this tax will be refunded by the first Congress after the Democratic party is restored to power. As our troops penetrated into the South, cotton was seized on behalf of the United States as the property of the enemy and much of it as the property of the Confederate States, and the proceeds were covered into the Treasury. Over $21,000,000 was thus covered into the Treasury, and of this fund the sum of $11,348,247 has been awarded and paid by the Court of Claims to every claimant who had either legal or equitable title to the cotton, and the remainder is now eagerly demanded by those who were open rebels, but who now, as leading Democrats, hope to reclaim what they lost by the war. I have in my hand fifteen different bills, now pending in the Democratic House of Representatives, to refund this cotton tax and the proceeds of captured and abandoned property, and to make easy this wholesale raid on the Treasury of the United States.

And, fellow citizens, I have here bills pending in that Democratic House more wide-reaching still. Here is a bill introduced by Mr.