Democratic Sentinel, Volume 1, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 November 1877 — THE FINANCES IN CONGRESS. [ARTICLE]

THE FINANCES IN CONGRESS.

Synopsis of Gen. Ewing’s Great Speech in the House in Support of the Repeal Bill. Mr. Ewing said it was a characteristic of popular government that the people gave their exclusive thought to one leading subject. Thus before the war slavery was the controlling question. During the war it was how to maintain the Government. Since then it was how to govern the Southern States. Now the question of paramount interest was the question of debt and currency. It would have been happy for the people if they had considered these questions earlier. They would have been saved among other things the passage of the act of repudiation and extortion of 1869 by which a contract, on which $1,600,000,000 of public debt was made,

was changed to the detriment of the people and to the advantage of the holders of public securities, without consideration, to a sum not less than $500,000,000, and they would have been saved that stealthy and rascally act for the demonetization of silver, and the crowning scheme of the money power for the oppression of the people—the Resumption law. He went on to argue that when the Resumption law was passed the volume of currency in circulation was $733,000,000, and that was only $2.50 per capita more than was in circulation in 1860, which his colleague (Garfield) had held up to admiration as a year of sound business and sound money. That act had put into the hands of capitalists the control es the industries of the Government. Proceeding to discuss Secretary Sherman’s construction of the law on the subject of reissuing legal tenders, he said that that gentleman was very apt to change his views, because in 1868 he told the people of Ohio that the payment of United States bonds in coin, while on their face they were to be paid in lawful money, would be repudiation and extortion, and yet within six months afterward he had reported in the Senate that act of repudiation and extortion falsely labeled, “an act to strengthen the public credit. ” If it were possible (Mr. Ewing continued) to substitute $354,000,000 of gold for greenback money, and if that gold so substituted would remain in circulation just as greenback money, there would be no very great mischief "done by the Resumption act further than the useless increase of the bonded debt to the amount of $354,000,000, but the trouble was that an attempt to make $354,000,000 in gold take the place of greenback money in the currency was utterly impossible. Gold could not remain in circulation in the present condition of the country, and every greenback redeemed was so much withdrawn from the effective currency, and its proportionate effect was the reduction of values. He said that before the greenback era there never had been kept afloat in this country more than $214,000,000 of paper money, with $285,000,000 in coin, and now, with $733,000,000 of paper money, there was not $150,000,000 of gold in the United States. Since 1860 the mines of the country had produced $1,257,000,000 of precious metals, and yet there was not in the country three-fitths of the little volume of coin that there was in 1860. Where had all the gold and silver gone ? It has gone to pay the debt of this country, and there was where would go all the coin that could be scraped together in the treasury or banks. This was the great debtor nation of the world. No nation owed outside of its own borders half the amount which America owed. More than half of the bonded debt of the country was held abroad, and there were State, city, railroad and other debts due abroad, the aggregate coin interest on which ran from $100,000,000 to $150,000,000 a year. From $30,000,000 to $50,000,000 a year was paid for shipping and as much more for the expenses of foreign travel, so that the annual drain of coiu from this country was from $175,000,000 to $250,000,000. How was that paid ? Not by the balance of trade, as might be said, because that balance for the last seven years had been $4,000,000 against this country. The interest was, therefore, as a rule, not paid by the balance of trade. It was paid partly by shipping $56,000,000 a year of precious metal. Discussing the preparations for resumption, “Here we are,” said he, “within thirteen months ot resumption, with $733,000,000 of paper money to be floated and with less than $40,000,000 of accumulated gold in the treasury and banks.” He declared that if this country were entirely free from debt, specie payment not be resumed without a contraction of the currency by at least one-half. Where, he asked, were gold and silver to be got ? Gould it be got in foreign markets? That had never been done and never could be done. The silver and gold mines in the country could not in twenty-five years furnish all that was needed even if gold and silver could be kept here. Whether this xnad scheme

of resumption were repealed now or forced on until popular indignation tore it to pieces, resumption had to be waited for until it became possible, and until a volume of coin had been accumulated in the country larger than the volume of paper money. Equalization would not be resumption. Paper money might be brought to par with gold and still there would not be resumption. Replying to Mr. Garfield’s argument that no one would want coin on resumption day, and taking up Mr. Garfield’s illustration of the farmer who sold his farm for SIO,OOO and would not take his pay in gold but in bills, he said it was not a question whether the people want gold or not. It is a question whether the Jim Fisks, the Jay Goulds, the bankers, the brokers, the importers, the savings banks, want it, and they certainly will want it faster than the Secretary of the Treasury will be able to give gold to them.

Mr. Ewing spoke of the enormous depreciation of values which he attributed to the Resumption act, and which he estimated at one-third of the whole. He characterized the Resumption law as practical confiscation by law of $3,500,000,000 of property. Three-fourths of all the classes of the country were debtors, and it was their hard-earned accumulations that were being wrested from them by this robber law. He spoke of the loss of the laboring classes as amounting to $3,000,000 a day, or $900,000,000 a year, and mentioned the statement made to him recently by the President of the Dayton and Southeastern Railroad Company, in Ohio, to the effect that hundreds of men had been offering to work on the road for bread and meat. “ Nothing,” said he, “ for clothes, nothing for wives and children, nothing to lay up in store for winter. Merely enough to keep the poor human body that was doing the labor able to exercise the necessary force. Oh, God! that bread should be so dear, and flesh and blood so cheap !” The law he continued,

was not going to stop with that fall of values. Whoever hugged the hope that the bottom had been touched had only to look at the facts to know that lower and lower ground had to be reached. A further fall of values had to be witnessed. There had also to be witnessed an increase of poverty and suffering, the practical confiscation of property and repudiation of a large part of the public debts of the country. He appealed to the moneyed men whether they would persist in their scheme of infatuation. Had they not heard enough to warn them that they had better stop ? What meaning had the labor riots—that almost civil war—six months ago ? The meaning of them was that labor had been trampled upon as much as it would stand. “ Go,” said he, “to any of our cities and see the hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of pale, wan, ragged, hungry people. I have seen them clubbed out of the parks of New York city at night —men who went there hoping to lie down on the grass and get a little fresh air and a cool resting-place. The thing has been pushed just as far as it will bear’. What are we to gain by inflicting such losses on our industry and labor ? What is the great advantage to be accomplished? It costs this country, in the loss of productive industries, in the unjust transfer of wealth from the debtor to the creditor, in the unjust increase of taxation, in the loss of labor to the wage people, more than all the wastes of the rebellion combined; and what are we to gain by adding to the enormous sacrifices of the rebellion a self-inflicted sacrifice even more stupendous ? Wbv we are to get back the banking system which existed before the war, modified a little, a little better in one respect than the old State-bank system, but a system the genius of which will be panic—a system which, in the nature of things, cannot be stable.” He spoke of the law for the payment of bonds in gold as an act of repudiation of $2,000,000,000 of contracts whose value rested on it, and declared that the repeal of the law and the putting back of those contracts to what was the -understanding of the parties at the time they were made was an act demanded by every consideration of individual interest and national honor. If the repeal of that law were repudiation, the hapless sufferers woidd not be the people at large, but the men probably who had instigated the passage of the law. He quoted Edmund Burke to the effect that it is to the property of the citizen and not to the demands of the creditor of the State that the original faith of the nation is given, and that the claim of the citizen is prior in time, paramount in title, and superior in equity. In conclusion he said :

“No greater question than this was ever presented to an American Congress for its action. It touches the happiness, the prosperity, the future of threefourths of the men, women and children in this land. Thousands of men have been driven by the Resumption law to insanity or suicide. Hundreds of thousands had been cast down from competency to poverty. Millions have been deprived of employment for their labor, on which rests the dependence of their families. It is now too late to right that wrong, but we may avert any greater wrong from them and millions of others by prompt action on the part of Congress and the President. Ido 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 vilifies every public man who dares to raise his voice against it—that power which in the flush and arrogance of its enormous and ill-gotten gams 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 land-marks. For twelve years past the financial legislation of this country has been dictated, eue 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 Liliputians. Thank God, they are now 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.”

France annually exports about 36,000 tons of butter, valued at over $17,000, - 000, most of which goes to England, notwithstanding all the boasted cattle there,