Democratic Sentinel, Volume 1, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 January 1878 — JUSTICE. [ARTICLE]

JUSTICE.

Senator Voorhees,of Indiana, Makes a Demand for It. Justice for the People as Well as for the Bondholders. An Exhaustive Review of the Whole Subject. In the Senate, a few days since, Mr. Matthews gave way to Senator Voerliees in order that he might address that body on a resolution submitted by him before tine holidays, declaring it of the highest importance that the financial credit of the Government be maintained. In order to be so, the Government itself, in all its departments, should, in good faith, keep all its contracts and obligations entered into with its own citizens. Mr. Voorhees said the agitation of the question of finance will never cease until the people are satisfied that the vast debt is in process of extinction on principles of justice to tax-paying labor, or until, on the other hand, they are subjugated into silent submission, and the Government itself becomes a moneyed aristocracy. Denunciation is now the principal weapon used by those who are ranged on the side of grasping wealth. There is no epithet, however base, that is not in daily use against all who venture to believe, as I do, that to a great extent our whole financial system is organized crime against the laboring, tax-paying men and women of the United States. The great plea of the present hour for the continuation of wrong and injustice is that good faith requires it. Those who, finding a monstrous evil imbedded in the laws of their country, seek to eradicate it by peaceful legislation, are at once, and with the utmost fury, assaulted as violators of public faith, enemies of the national honor, and worse, if possible, than common swindlers. This plea, so loud now in our ears, has been invoked in behalf of every wickedness that has ever cursed the world. The usurper invokes it to protect the throne lie has stolen as soon as he is seated. The tyrant invokes it to shelter his prerogative, and his nobility in turn invoke it in order to live in ease and splendor off the labor of others. Mr. Voorhees reviewed the financial legislation since 1862, and said experience had shown the legal tender to be the best money that ever circulated. Every Government bond which did not on its face stipulate payment in coin was made payable by the express words of the law in legal-tender notes. This enactment guaranteed to the American people the right to pay three-fourths of the national debt in national currency. It was tlie law of contract when all the 5-20 bonds, amounting to over §1,500,000,000, were purchased from the Government by bondholders and paid for in this currency at par, when it was quoted at from 40 to 60 per cent, below par in coin. Every one understood the law to be as I have stated it at the time of its passage; in fact, the great struggle then was whether even the interest on the bonds I have mentioned should be paid in coin. No one in debate made the slightest pretense or intimation that the principal of the bonds was payable in coin. During the full term of seven eventful years that followed there is not a platform of either political party in any State in the Union which makes such an assertion. Mr. Voorhees alluded to Secretary Sherman’s letter of 1868, favoring the payment of bonds in the same kind of money as bought them, and his subsequent action in procuring the passage of an act for the payment of bonds in coin, which he said was open repudiation of a solemn contract, and fastened an extortion of not less than §500,000,000 on the staggering industries of the country as the speculative profits of the operation. In the whole financial history of the civilized world no parallel can be found to this audacious deed of broken faith, deliberate treachery to the people, and national dishonesty. It stands out by itself, towering high above all common frauds, and dwarfing them in comparison with its own vast proportions. It will bear the names of those who enacted it to distant generations amidst the groans, curses, and lamentations of those who toil on land and on sea, and more deeply engraven than any other name will be forever found that of the Secretary of the Treasury, as the author of what he himself said constituted the twofold crime of repudiation and extortion. Mr. Voorhees, in support of his position, quoted the language of Senator Morton in 1869, as follows : “ A combination of stock-jobbers, as destitute of conscience as pirates, and inspired alone by greed for money, successfully thundered at these doors, and finally drove this Government into the most stupendous act of bad faith and legalized robbery ever practiced upon any people since the dawn of history.” He next took up the Funding act of 1870, charging it was the offspring of an apprehension that the work of repudiating the contract for the payment of the 5-20 bonds might not be quite complete. Thus it was provided that an issue of new coin bonds should be made in place of the original ones. The amount saved in interest is trifling when compared with the loss by the whole transaction. Mr. Voorhees then argued that by the laws of March, 1869, and July, 1870, bonds outstanding and afterwards to be issued were payable in coin, not in gold alone, nor in silver alone, but in coin. He quoted Mr, Sherman in 1869 as explicitly favoring this view. Mr. Voorhees commented at some length on the passage of the law of Feb. 12, 1873, which he said doomed the dollar of our fathers, and its enactment was as completely unknown to tlie people, and indeed to four-fifths of Congress itself, as the presence of a burglar in a house at midnight to its sleeping inmates. The silver dollar was eliminated from our money system under tha cover of false pretense. Mr. Voorhees proceeded to show that, of the entire trading and commercila populations of the earth, more than four times as many people have chosen silver as have chosen gold, and more than five times as many have chosen silver as have chosen gold and silver together. The laboring classes desire money to be plentiful, while those who wish to fasten their idle wealth on productions of labor

clamor for scarce and dear money. It was in the interest of the latter powerful class that silver was demonetized. He referred to the act of Jan. 14, 1875, for the resumption of specie payments, and said the law of February, 1873, taking away silver money from the people, and the law of January, 1875, fixing the day now less than a year in advance, when greenbacks shall also perish, are twin monsters of evil, bom of the same parentage, and linked together for the destruction of all money save gold. He vividly portrayed the effect of such legislation upon business and labor. He spoke of the impossibility of resuming January, 1879, and attributed the vast shrinkage in the value of property and universal distress to the policy of contraction, and said during the four years when the volume of currency averaged §1,000,000,000 the business failures of. the entire country reached only 2,167, less in number than occurred in any three months of the year jnst closed. During the period which is now stigmatized as one of inflation, the windows of business houses were not darkened, and business men did not go as mourners about the streets. The laborer did not go home without bread to his wife and children. Helpless millions did not cower and tremble at the approach of winter for lack of food and shelter. The public peace was not broken by riots in resistance to starvation wages. The courts were not principally occupied in enforcing collections, foreclosing mortgages, ordering Sheriff’s sales, or in punishing the destitute outcast. The speaker next turned his attention to the national banks, and said the system of national banking now in use is the most elaborate and complete scheme for making people pay tribute to wealth, in order to obtain a circulating medium, ever known in the financial history of the world. There is not a dollar in the hands of the people on which they have not paid a tax for the privilege of having it put in circulation by the Government. The national bank is the middle-man between the Government and the people, and is enormously paid for doing what the Government ought directly to do itself. On Oct. 1, 1877, there were -2,080 national banks, with resources of §l,741,000,000, and on these resources the interest paid by the people was §130.000,000 per annum. Mr. Voorhees said he represented those who demanded—1. The restoration of the silver dollar exactly as it stood before it was touched by the act of February, 1873. They desire that it shall have unlimited coinage, not fearing that it will become too plenty for their wants, and that it be made a full legal tender, believing that it is as good now with which to pay all debts, public and private, as it was dur - ing eighty-one years of American history. 2. The repeal unconditionally of the act of Jan. 14, 1875, compelling the resumption of specie payments on Jan. 1, 1879, holding that the question of a return to a specie basis for our currency should be controlled entirely by the business interests of the country. They do not believe that the country should be dragged through the depths of ruin, wretchedness, and degradation in order to reach a gold standard for the benefit alone of the income classes. 3. That the national-banking system be removed, and a circulating medium provided by the Government for the people without taxing them for the priviledge of obtaining it, and they ask that the amount thus placed in circulation shall bear a reasonable and judicious proportion to the business transactions and population of the United States. 4. That the currency authorized and circulated on the authority of the Government shall be made a legal tender in payment of all debts, public or private, including all dues to the Government, well knowing that it will then be at par with gold, or more likely at a premium over it; and, 5. That hereafter the financial policy of the country be framed permanently in their interest, that they shall not be discriminated against in future legislation, as in the past, and that their prosperity and not the mere growth of income to retired capitalists, shall be the primary duty of the Government. In conclusion, Mr. V< orhees quoted from articles he had noticed in cerlain Eastern newspapers in regard to the rights of the bondholders, the duty of the laboring classes, and the policy that should be pursued by capitalists to counteract the effects of anticipated legislation on the silver question, and said: Sir, I have no word of menace to utter on this floor, but, in behalf of every laborer and every owner of soil whom I represent, I warn all such as value their investments that when these doctrines of despotism are sought to be enforced, this fair land will again be convulsed in agony, and the fires of liberty will blaze forth again as they did 100 years ago in defense of the natural rights of man. May the wisdom of our fathers and benignity of our God avert such an issue; but, if it shall come, if infatuation has seized our councils, the result will only add one more instance to the long catalogue of human crime and folly, where avarice, like ambition, overleaps itself, and in its unholy attelnpt to rob others of their possessions loses its own.