FROM EWING'S SPEECH ON RESUMPTION, 1877.

"No greater injury could be inflicted on a people by its Government, than the reduction of the volume of currency, to which the business and values of the country were adjusted. To decrease the value of money was to strike at the interests of the whole body of the people. No man could engage profitably in merchandise, while the values, which he was handling, were failing, etc.

I do not appeal to that money power, which seeks its fortune over the wrecked happiness and accumulations of its fellow-men-a power, to which our unhappy civil war gave birth-which has grown so enormous through unjust financial legislation; which now 'bestrides our narrow world like a colossus,' which subsidizes the press, which captures statesmen and parties, and makes them its subservient tools; which hounds down and villifies every public man, who dares to raise his voice against it. That power, in the flush and arrogance of its enormous and ill-gotten gains, has a heart of stone, not to be touched by human sympathy and compassion. I appeal to the masses, to their faithful Representatives (I thank God) of both political parties on this floor. The true aim of government is the greatest good to the greatest number, and whoever by legislation or otherwise changes the value of a contract, is as accursed as he, who removes his neighbor's landmarks. For twelve years past the financial legislation of this country has been dictated, one would think, in Lombard Street or Wall Street, and the people have been plundered by every fresh enactment. They have suffered the fate of the giant Gulliver, when tied down by the Lilliputians. Thank God they are about to rise-to burst the bonds, which their petty foes have fastened upon them, while sleeping, and to walk abroad again in their own majesty," etc.

SENATOR VOORHEES ON THE FISCAL POLICY OF THE GovERNMENT, DECEMBER 16, 1881.

"MR. PRESIDENT: It is now nearly nine years since silver money was destroyed in this country by the repeal of the law of 1792, authorizing its coinage. This famous act of fraud upon a long and well-settled financial policy and of wrong and injustice to the business and labor of the American people, was consummated on the 12th day of February, 1873. And then for five years and sixteen days it remained upon the statute-books to curse the land. It took the people that length of time to discover, overtake and wipe out this act of unwarranted and clandestine legislation. But, when the evil work came to be fully comprehended throughout the country, the popular voice was neither slow nor timid in making itself heard. It did not salute the ears of legislators with the soft music of a sighing zephyr, dallying with summer flowers; it came here rather with the fierce and commanding majesty of the hurricane in its wrath; it came from every seat of honest enterprise and industry; from the farmer, the manufacturer, the mechanic, the merchant, the trader, the wage laborer, from every class of business people, and it came breathing forth the indignation of a constituency, who found themselves betrayed and juggled in a matter of domestic policy, vital to their prosperity and happiness.

On the 28th day of February, 1878, the voice of the American people was obeyed in these halls, and silver money, the money of Washington, the unit of value, devised by Jefferson, the money of great minds in every age of civilized man, the money of the Constitution, the money of every period and of every political party of this Republic, until a recent day, was restored by law to coinage and to circulation. Let that day be remembered forever in the American calendar as one, on which a great victory was obtained, the first in many years, by the industrious, productive masses over the usury-gathering, idle, unproductive

few. This triumph of popular justice was not the less precious to honest and generous minds, because of the scenes and circumstances, which attended it. The act for the restoration of silver money was passed through both branches of Congress in the face of prophecies of evil to the country, etc.

When their pretended concern for the welfare of the country, and their real concern for their own enormous profits, were exposed and disregarded here, they bent their faces confidently toward the Executive Department of the Government, that last refuge, as it seems, for special privileges to favored classes. They were not mistaken; they did not make their appeal to that Department in vain,

In defiance of the public will, in contempt of the policy of the Government for more than four-score years, and in open disregard of the wants of trade and business, the administration of Mr. Hayes sent to us his puny protest against the dreadful consequences of silver money. His veto, however, was swept aside by the Congress of the United States, as people brush cobwebs out of their way. The bill, restoring the silver dollar to its place in the coinage laws of the Government, was enacted into a law, over all combined opposition, by the tremendous vote of 196 to 73 in the House, and 46 to 19 in the Senate.

And now, sir, what response has the business of the country, during nearly four years past, made to the evil and vehement prognostications against the use of silver money? Has it brought ruin, has it brought calamity, has it brought distress to the people? Who has the hardihood to say so? On the contrary, behold a contrast in the condition of the country. The five years, during which silver did not exist as legal currency, were years of the most appalling financial disaster ever known in American history. I am speaking now of what all men know, and stating that, which no man will deny From 1873 to 1878 there was a period of mourning over lost property, lost homes and lost labor, in

every active business community in the United States,

etc.

The passage of the Silver Bill was accompanied by the groans and lamentations of the associated national banks, expressed in many a sombre memorial, petition, remonstrance and expostulation, laid before Congress, etc. .

The Act of Congress, by which silver was dishonored, was a prominent feature in a most unrighteous and criminal endeavor to so contract, cut down and diminish the amount of money in use among the people, that the hoarded millions of the banker and the capitalist would have more power in the affairs of men, than all the other powers of this Government combined. The dream of certain minds, in this country, has been for many years past to create in fact, if not in name, an order of aristocracy, a privileged class, with their rank and importance founded, not upon intellect, culture, refinement, grace or goodness, but upon their success in the practice of avarice, the meanest and most sordid passion of the human heart ever spoken of in the heavens above or the earth below. In furtherance of this purpose the possession of money, especially in considerable sums, being a badge of the new nobility, the common people were to have as little of it as possible, and for that little to be dependent entirely on the lords of capital, etc.

The Secretary in trying to make the impression, that silver money is a drug and a failure, and that the people do not want it. Who can justify this assault upon the existence of a hundred millions of currency, possessed of the same purchasing power as gold? I denounce it, and challenge the friends of such a policy, if it has any here, to come to its rescue. Let those, who will or dare, stand forth as its champions. This issue, thus forced without reason or justice upon the country, will be met by the country, and its authors will be sternly rebuked.

Such a movement, however, against financial stability and security, must necessarily have a powerful inspiration in some deeply interested quarter. We are not left in doubt

at all as to the source of that inspiration. In connection with the proposed retirement of silver, and in order to quiet the fear in the public mind of a destructive financial contraction, the Secretary, as the mouthpiece of the banks, is good enough to say in his report:

'There need be no apprehension of a too limited paper circulation. The national banks are ready to issue their notes in such quantities as the laws of trade demand, and as security therefor the Government will hold an equivalent in its own bonds,' etc.

We are told, that the national banks are ready to issue their notes in place of the silver currency, marked for destruction, and to do so in such quantity as the laws of trade demand, the banks themselves, of course, being the judges of the laws of trade and of their demands. The country is to depend, in other words, on the interest or the generosity of the banks for its supply of money, etc.

The question, here presented by the Secretary of the Treasury, is whether to such minds shall be surrendered the entire control of supply and circulation of the currency. Who is ready to support such a proposition? Has national bank money been furnished at so little expense to the people, that they want it to take the place of all other kinds? I do not wonder, that the banks want a total monopoly of the currency; but it is astounding to me, that taxpayers should be willing for them to have any control at all of that vital question. The desire of the banks to destroy silver and greenbacks is very easily understood, etc.

It is difficult, in moderate terms, to characterize such a recommendation. It is a wanton and, to my mind, a criminal assault upon the financial stability and the business prosperity of the whole country, etc.

But the Secretary of the Treasury does not stop with the recommendation I have cited, for the destruction of good money in the form of silver certificates; he modestly asks for the repeal of the act of February 28, 1878, providing for the coinage of silver, and requests, that the whole subject be