Democratic Sentinel, Volume 1, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 September 1877 — THE IOWA CAMPAIGN. [ARTICLE]

THE IOWA CAMPAIGN.

Speech of the Hon. John P. Irish at Council Bluffs. The Crimes of the Republican Party Vividly Portrayed. Fellow-Citizens : As the country plodded through a long-drawn Settlement of the questions out of which grew the war and which grew out of the war, it yearly became plainer that the old strings had been harped until they were out of tune. The sympathies and impulses of the North, so often melted to tears by the slavery question, strung to a high key for so long, had lost their tone, and the whispers of love and mercy drawn from them by the real and fancied wrongs of slavery had changed to a coarse twang of vengeance and vulgar revenge.

The neo is of the national soul had long been the text of the agitator and the theme of the philanthropist, but, as a settlement of sentimental political questions was reached, the wants of the national body were asserted. Debt was upon us, carrying an interest charge annually upon the labor of the land double the volume of the entire national debt in 1860. The management and payment of this debt became in the eye of the publicist and statesman at once the leading question in American politics, for in its management and a proper system of revenue lay every economic interest of the whole country. As a few wise men were seeking to put these practical questions forward, there arose another school of politicians headed by Jay Cooke and commissioned to teach the 'people that a national debt is a national blessing, and from this germ grew financial fungi of all sorts, until it is no wonder that the ideas of good and sensible men have grown into antagonism to the • sound principles of political economy—the laws of finance and commerce. I think the great need of the day is a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles ; a constant teaching of the truth in respect to money and its relations to the welfare and happiness of civilized people. The Republican party has taken good care not so to teach. It has kept the public mind busy with other things. The negro vote and voter, negro equality, the rebel debt and claims, the bloody shirt, each has had its brief day on the stage to tickle the popular fancy or fan the popular temper into a roaring rage, while the prosperity of the country was being sapped, and wo seemed content to remain a nation producing more of gold and silver than any other on the planet, and yet do all our great trade in a fluctuating, uncertain paper currency. From this condition of inattention to our material interests we were aroused for a time by the panic of 1873, which ruined thousands where every avenue w r as gorged with credit currency, and left colossal enterprises like the North Pacific road in sprawling ruin. Again Republican politicians drew off public attention by the old war cries, and carried the party through the last Prcsidcntal election to a fraudulent seizure of the Presidency lost by it at the polls, and was in the act of further diverting public attention by pointing with pride to Gen. Grant snoring under a silk quilt at Windsor Castle, the elated recipient of the first British honors bestowed upon an American General since Benedict Arnold’s day, when with a soundin crash came the August strikes which clouded seven States with anarchy for a week, and so jarred the whole country as to set every man looking for the cause and cure of an evil which could no longer be ignored. With the national finances, the labor and trade questions, the lowa Democracy has dealt in its platform, and lam here to construe that platform and defend it within the limits of its own language and give each part an interpretation consistent with the whole.

The Democratic party of lowa declares for a revenue tariff only. This declaration is consistent with the delivery against subsidies, since a protective tariff—the Republican plan—is but a tax levied on the people, not to support the Government, but to fatten the manufacturers. It is a tax on the many for the benefit of the few, and is the basest form of subsidy because of its indirection. It is robbery of the people m such a way that they note the theft only in then- poverty and nakedness, and cannot readily fix the responsibility for the crime. American manufacturers fattened by this tax levied upon other industries are to-day exposing their wares in England, paying freight and selling them to Englishmen for less than they sell the same goods here at home, within sight of the factory smoke. We read of this driving Englishmen out of English markets, and are expected to go into patriotic ecstacies over it, and forget that if our manufacturers do this at a profit they are able to sell at the same ates at home, less the freight across the Atlantic, plus the carriage to whatever American market they choose to sell in. I believe John Randolph defined protection to mean paying a New Englander $2 for what we can buy of an Old Englander for sl. This may now’bo paraphrased into asking $2 at home for what wo sell at a profit abroad for sl. We next pass on to our children the warning that came to us from our fathers, and declare further supremacy of the civil over the military power. It needs no argument. The Republican party ruled the South through eleven years of peace by the army. For eleven years the Democrats protested against this abuse, and last year carried the country upon that protest by a majority so emphatic that an acting President, who usurped without shame an office that belonged to another, and struck down without pity or remorse the foul instruments of his fraudulent elevation, dared not disobey the majesty of a white majority of 1,000,000 votes; and so we find Mr. Hayes subordinating the military to the civil power, and returning the army to its proper functions. We declare for separation of church and state; a principle so salutary that the times in which we live are satirized in the apparent necessity for its reiteration. We affirm the equal rights of all citizens before the law, under whihh principle the Democratic party took shape under Jefferson’s master hand. The Federalists denied the equality of foreignborn citizens, no matter what their character, culture, or patriotic services were, and the political heirs of the Federalists, the Republicans of to-day, put foreign-born citizens under the same ban by excluding in at least one Republican State in the Union the vote of a foreigner unless he has a property qualification not exacted of a native. So, again, the Republicans compel us to nail to our mast this trite declaration, which we will repeat so long as they are anywhere in power and continue to persecute and oppress men for their birth or religion.

Opposition to subsidies is another Democratic principle, foully violated by the Republican party and in need of agitation now because it is understood that Mr. Hayes rode to office in Tom Scott’s car, on the back of a grand gift enterprise which reached from the corpse of the North Pacific to the cradle of its South Pacific twin, showering offices, jobs, and juicy things between, and /caching into a slimy oblivion to materialize the ghost of dead Whiggery. We declare Republican class legislation to be responsible for the pauperism of labor. It is true. Every striker struck because for seventeen years there had been a Republican party in this country. Wherever a mob roared, its noise was notice to the world of the presence of the pest of Republican partyism here. Every incendiary who did arson was the embodied consequence of a Republican party. Every murderer who shed blood was a red-handed witness that the Republican party had been in power in this land. Every rioter who groans from a jail is in prison for the*crimes of this party. Every murderer who will swing from a scaffold dangles there to expiate crimes done by the Republican party. There is no evasion of this. If there are bread riots in Manchester, Paris, or Brussels, we charge them upon maladministration of the Government, and by this judgment we must be judged ourselves or no longer assume to sit in the judgment seat. To the vicious laws which bear this bad responsibility reference is already made. The tariff and subsidy legislation have, in part, done the work.

The demonetizing of silver was accomplished by peculiarly Republican methods, in the dark and secretly, so that even those who voted for it were unaware of the effect of the bill. It is no wonder the people should reject scientific discussion of the propriety of a measure passed in that way. and should indignantly demand the reinstatement of silver as a legal-tender coin before examining into the merits of the

single or double standard. The reinstatement I favor jn the conviction that scientific conclusions will be reached that will condemn the employment of any unstable standard of value, and that the Democratic party will bring legislation upon the subject out of the dark corner into which Republicanism has crowded it If it prove that the double standard will not work, that the silver will float the gold out of the country and leave ns to bear the load of cast-off silver from Germany and the other singlestandard countries, an intelligent adjustment will soon relieve us of the evils which would follow. Upon the general matter of currency and resumption the Democrats of lowa declare: “We favor the retention of a greenback currency and declare against any further contraction, and we favor the substitution of greenbacks for national-bank bills.” The legal-tender law, under which the greenbacks were issued, fixes their volume at $■'400,000,000. This law was denounced as unconstitutional by the Democracy of this country when it was passed, and a Republican Supreme Court has since decided that iti time of peace it would have been unconstitutional, but was all right in war. That law nearly doubled the cost of the war. Greenbacks fell as low as 35 cents on the dollar, so that the Government paid nearly $3 for every dollar’s worth of material it used. They rallied a little, but averaged so low that it is fair to say they doubled the cost to the people of a war of which they rank among the most troublesome relics. The Government should have issued treasury notes, and, promptly enforcing its taxing power, should have maintained a credit that would have floated its bonds, by their sale raising means far more cheaply than by the costly and unconstitutional experiment of a forced loan, for the greenback issue was a forced loan m all its characteristics. As we told the truth in declaring the issue unconstitutional, and as the Republicans only justify it as a war measure, it is plain that there can be no further issue of greenbacks unless we go to war for the authority. There can be no objection, to the retention of the greenbacks as a permanent paper currency, in preference to the national-bank notes, which have not the legal-tender quality, so I take our declaration to mean that, as the national-bank charters expire—and we cannot disturb them short of their expiration—these institutions should not be re-chartered, and, as their circulation shrinks with each dying charter, the greenbacks are to take its place. The resuit will be a constant appreciation of the purchasing power of the greenback and a constant approach of that currency to par in gold ; so that if no other causes operated we would reach specie payments over the dead vaults of national banks, which I am sure the people of this country will never consent to rechartering, as banks of issue. I have never seen a more intelligent and compact plan for bringing greenbacks to par than is proposed by this plank in our platform, and I commend it to the attention and examination of financiers East and West. I discuss under this head the general question of resumption. Let us remember that the bank note and bank check—considering for the purpose of this examination the greenback to be a bank note since it„performs the same office—are substantially the same thing in the sense that neither is in itself value, but each implies the presence somewhere of value upon which it is an order for payment. If no deposit lie behind the bank check it is worthless. If no deposit or power or disposition to pay in value lie behind the greenback it is worthless. Rcsunq>tion then means that the Government shall have the ability to pay its checks, notes, greenbacks, on demand in value ; that is to say in gold. When that time comes private debtors will have a place at which to buy the gold called for by individual contracts, and the difference between gold and paper will be a thin margin of one-fourth of 1 per cent., with a possibility that occasionally the paper may command a premium over the metal, because of convenience of carnage and certainty of reconversion at par. I may be asked why repeal the resumption date, January, 1879, if it is desirable to resume at all ? The Democratic party demands a repeal of the date, because the Democratic party has common sense on its side and is guided by the example of nations that have trodden hard the path we are now in. England experimented with her finances during a long grapple with the first Napoleon, and at the close of her complications on the continent was financially prostrate ; with specie payment to all appearance hopelessly suspended. During nearly a quarter of a century the British Parliament attempted to resume by fixing dates at which to resume eleven different times, and at last, after ten repeals, resumption occm-red in advance of the farthest date fixed. You may query why the date should hinder. It is because resumption is in the nature of payment of a debt. No debt is ever easy to pay when the debtor is in poverty and distress, groaning under the pinch of hard times. Payment is voluntary and easy when times are good and prosperity is the rule. Resumption is an event which excites apprehension, it is waited for with an expectation of great change in all com* mercial and financial relations. It is getting down to hard-pan. If a date is fixed people wait rather than work. It will not do to make this investment or start that enterprise, for there is no telling what effect resumption will have upon it, so we wait and wait, a nation of Micawbers ; business is paralyzed and times grow hard. Men think it is a lack of currency, and clamor for more. If the cry is heeded and iniiation occurs resumption is postponed. If the paralysis continue and resumption is attempted at the date, without the degree of prosperity and confidence to warrant it, death follows paralysis and ruin whelms the country. As soon as the Resumption act of 1875’ passed times began tightening. Enterprise ceased. Real estate cannot be sold. Manufactures are idle. Railroad building stopped, and we all sat down to wait. In 1876 the Democratic party, desiring resumption, demanded the repeal op the date as a hindrance thereto. The Democratic House repealed the date. Men began to venture upon business operations. The Russo-Turkish war gave us dominion of the grain market of the world. Crops at home arc good. Republican. Senators, like Allison, of lowa, are joining the Democrats in the cry for repeal, and greenbacks, feeling the impulse of this new-born prosperity, have crept up to 97. lam not sure but we will resume before 1879. If I knew the Senate would join the Democratic House in the repeal I would confidently predict resumption before that time, as the natural result of a prosperity which grows up to the volume of currency, using all the circulating medium, and demanding an invariable standard of value, into which the paper currency is convertible at par, and by which the products of the country are measured. Above all, we want an end to tinkering. No business can'grow, based upon flic fluctuations of an irredeemable paper currency, or the play of shifting Congressional policies. The business men of the country want stability. John Sherman is no guarantee of stability, nor is Morton, nor Hayes, nor Stanley Matthews. They shift with the tide. The Democrats offer then - past financial record as proof that stability may be expected under their domination. Our party first forced the payment of the poor man’s wages and the rich man’s profits in the same kind of money—gold: and under that policy our growth was the world's eighth wonder. Here was the world’s labor market. There were no tramps, no bread riots, no war for wages degenerating into a base assault upon property and a bloody attack upon fife. To take the country far from the evils of a mixed and currency, from trade destroyed and labor turned beggar, out of the treacherous quicksands of Republican financial folly to the solid ground of safety and confidence, where waving fields and rattling mills on either hand lift high the yellow banners and sing the glad song of plenty and prosperity, is our mission and purpose.