Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 March 1886 — A REAL ORATOR. [ARTICLE]

A REAL ORATOR.

A Few Paragraphs From the Speech of Hon. Roger Q. Mills, of Texas, on the Silver Question. Would you take the country again through that Talley of the shadow of death? Would you reteat again that experience so full of lamentations and mournings and woes? If you would, listen to the soft, sweet notes of the siren as she sings from the vaults of the Nati nal bankers about dishonest dollars. Drive out into banishment the old silver dollars of our fathers; call in the silver certificates; retire all the Treasury notes; mate money so scarce that the poor bankers in New York can buy a bushel of wheat for a dime, a pound of cotton for a penny; make it impossible for people to pay their debts; make labor so cheap that working people can only earn enough to pay interest to mo-ney-lenders and taxes to support the Government, and you will see again the return of that night with all its horrors intensified. Sir, let the man who lives by the sweat of his trow, and his representative here, be not deceived by the shams and false pretenses that are thrown around this measure, that is filled to the brim with the dir st of consequences to millions of people. Let the laborer remember, and write it on his wristlets, carve it on his frontlets, and wear it as an amulet over his heart, that scarce money is his sleepless and unforgiving foe, a foe whose bosom never swells with a sigh of sorrow, whose eye never moistens with a tear of pity. No one can den that it increases the burden of debt which labor must pay. No one c m deny that it makes the lifo struggle darker and haroer. One of the most distinguished advocate of the suppression of silV*r has but recently«aid if we stop coining silver that the act will be a drag upon the production and that suffocation and strangulation are words not too strong to express the agonies of a people who are encircled in the coils of the gol en serpent. And yet, with our eyes open and looking down into this abyss of hv.man suffering that yawns before us, we ar? entreated and importuned to drag the country to the edge of the precipice and plunge it into the tortures and agonies of contraction to satiate the lust for gold. Sir, history has recorded on its pages every kind of scourge that has been sent upon mankind from the hand of his fellow, and it has carved the names of the guilty wretches on its pillory where they stand before the eyes of each recurring generation to suffer the execration due the atrocity of the crimes. It tells of Nero vainly struggling to extinguish the truths of Christianity by lighting the streets of Rome with the burning bodies of her missionaries; of Tamerlane discussing philosophy w : th the sages of Aleppo while his savage soldiery were gathering the heads of his slaughtered foemen into monumental piles to please the eye of the royal invader; it tells of Lhilip 11. sacking, burning and butchering the inhabitants of the Netherlands, loyal to his kingdom and crown, because they elected to worship at the shrines where conscience bade them kneel; it tells of the obliteration as Poland, the partition of its territory, the banishment and confinement of its unhappy people in the caves of Siberia by the sceptered robbers of Russia, Prussia and Austria; it tells of the conquest and long-continued oppression and robbery of Ireland by the Kings, Parliaments and people of England for 500 years, and that in the face of the remonstrances of all Christendom still stretches her victim on the bed of torture. But in all the wild, reckless, and remorseless brutalities that have marked the footprints of resistless power there is some extenuating circumstances that mitigates the

severity of the punishment due to the crime. Some have been the product of the fierce passions of war, some from the antipathy that separates alien races, some from the superstitions of opposing religions. But the crime that is now sought te be perpetrated on more than fifty millions of people comes neither from the camp of a conqueror, the hand of a foreigner, nor the altar of an idolator. But it comes from those in whose veins runs the blood of a common ancestry, who were born under the same skies, speak the same language, reared in the same institutions, and nurtured in the prin isles of the same religious faith.— t comes from the cold, phlegmatic, marble heart of avarice.—avarice that seeks' to impale the whole land on a bed of torture to gratify the lust for gold —[applause]—avarice surrounded by every comfort that wealth can command, and rich enough to satisfy every want save that which refuses to be satisfied without the suffocation and strangulation of all the labor in the land. With a fo v head that refuses to be ashamed h demands of Congress an act that will paralyze all the forces of production, shut out labor from all employment, increase the burr! en of debts and taxation, and send desolation and suffering into all the homes of the poor. In this hour, fraught with perd to the whole country, I appeal to the unpurchased Representatives of the American people to meet this bold and insolent demand line men. Let us stand in the breach and call the battle on, and never leave the field until the people’s money shall be re dored to the mints on equal terms with gold as it was years ago. [Prolonged applause.]