CHAPTER XXI.

IRREDEEMABLE PAPER CURRENCY.

ON the money question Mr. Blaine stands among the soundest and most advanced financiers, and has always stood there. In addition to illustrations already given of this fact some points may be cited from his speech on this subject, which was delivered in the House of Representatives, February 10th, 1876, a date prior to the resumption of specie payment in our land. The financial situation of the day was thus stated in the opening paragraph of the speech: "For more than two years the country has been suffering from prostration in business; confidence returns but slowly; trade revives only partially; and to-day, with capital unproductice and labor unemployed, we find ourselves in the midst of an agitation respecting the medium with which business transactions shall be carried on. Until this question is definitely adjusted it is idle to expect that full measure of prosperity to which the energies of our people and the resources of the land entitle

us.

"If," said Mr. Blaine as he proceeded on this topic, "there was any one principle that was

rooted and grounded in the minds of our earlier statesmen, it was the evil of paper-money; and no candid man of any party can read the Constitution of the United States and not be convinced that its formers intended to protect and defend our people from the manifold perils of an irredeemable currency. Nathaniel Macon, one of the purest and best of American statesman, himself a soldier of the Revolution and a member of Congress continuously during the administration of our first six Presidents, embracing in all a period of nearly forty years, expressed the whole truth when he declared in the Senate that this was a hard-money government, founded by hardmoney men, who had themselves seen and felt the evil of paper-money and meant to save their posterity from it.'

"To this uniform adherence to the specie standard the crisis of the Rebellion forced an exception. In January, 1862, with more than half a million of men in arms, with a daily expenditure of nearly two millions of dollars, the Government suddenly found itself without money. Customs yielded but little, internal taxes had not yet been levied, public credit was feeble, if not paralyzed, our armies had met with one signal reverse and nowhere with marked success, and men's minds were filled with gloom and apprehension. The one supreme need of the hour was money, and money the Government did not have. What,

then, should be done-rather, what could be done? The ordinary Treasury note had been tried and failed, and those already issued were discredited and below the value of the bills of country banks. The Government in this great and perilous need promptly called to its aid a power never before exercised. It authorized the issue of one hundred and fifty millions of notes, and declared them to be a legal tender for all debts, public and private, with two exceptions.

"The ablest lawyers who sustained this measure did not find warrant for it in the text of the Constitution, but like the late Senator Fessenden, of my own State, placed it on the ground of 'absolute, overwhelming necessity;' and that illustrious Senator declared that, 'the necessity existing, he had no hesitation.' Indeed, sir, to hesitate was to be lost, for the danger was that, if Congress prolonged the debate on points of constitutional construction, its deliberation might be interrupted by the sound of artillery on the opposite shore of the Potomac. The Republican Senators and representatives, therefore, dismissing all doubts and casuistry, stood together for the country."

CHAPTER XXII.

PURITY OF THE BALLOT-BOX.

ON December 11th, 1878, Mr. Blaine delivered one of his most effective speeches. A resolution introduced by himself was then pending. It provided for inquiry into certain alleged frauds in elections then recently held in the Southern States. Mr. Blaine opened by rehearsing the current rumors concerning these abuses and pressed his proposed inquiry in these words:

"The issue thus raised before the country, Mr. President, is not one of mere sentiment for the rights of the negro-though far distant be the day when the rights of any American citizen, however black or however poor, shall form the mere dust of the balance in any controversy; nor is the issue one that involves the waving of the "bloody shirt," to quote the elegant venacular of Democratic vituperation; nor still further is the issue as now presented only a question of the equality of the black voter of the South with the white voter of the South; the issue, Mr. President, has taken a far wider range, one of portentous magnitude; and that is, whether the white voter of the North shall be equal to the white voter of

the South in shaping the policy and fixing the destiny of this country; or whether, to put it still more baldly, the white man who fought in the ranks of the Union Army shall have as weighty and influential a vote in the Government of the Republic as the white man who fought in the ranks of the rebel army. The one fought to uphold, the other to destroy, the Union of the States, and to-day he who fought to destroy is a far more important factor in the Government of the nation than he who fought to uphold it.

"Let me illustrate my meaning by comparing groups of States of the same representative strength North and South. Take the States of South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana. They send seventeen Representatives to Congress. Their aggregate population is composed of ten hundred and thirty-five thousand whites and twelve hundred and twenty-four thousand colored; the colored being nearly two hundred thousand in excess of the whites. Of the seventeen representatives, then, it is evident that nine were apportioned to these States by reason of their colored population, and only eight by reason of their white population; and yet in the choice of the entire seventeen Representatives the colored voters had no more voice or power than their remote kindred on the shores of Senegambia or on the Gold Coast. The ten hundred and thirtyfive thousand white people had the sole and