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have given hopes that journalism is increasing in the appreciation of all that is necessary to making it noble and generous and charitable. The duty of enlarging the sphere of journalism rests with us who are outside of it. If, with all the means in our power, we can make the people so intelligent that they will patronize only the best journals, we shall have done our part; and if, on your part, you do so enlarge the sphere of your work in increasing its intelligence, justice, and force, that ignorant and weak men will not want your journal, and only the worthy and noble will desire it, then, between you and us, the profession of journalism will go on improving with the growth of civilization and with the increasing security of liberty.

J. A. MACGAHAN, the "Ohio man" referred to above, was born in Ohio, in 1844; was a correspondent in Europe as early as 1868, and for some years did duty in Europe and Asia as correspondent of the New York Herald; was with the army of General Bourbaki in France in 1870; was in Paris during the Commune, and was saved from death at the hands of the Communists by the United States Minister; went to Khiva with the Russian army in 1873, contrary to General Kauffman's orders; reported the Carlist outbreak in Spain in 1874; went to the Arctic world in 1875; exposed, as correspondent of the London Daily News, the Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria, in 1876, thereby causing a great sensation in England; was with the Russian army in Turkey in 1877, where he was for a time an associate of the famous correspondent, Archibald Forbes; died in Constantinople, of fever, in 1878.

HONEST

MONEY.

SPEECH DELIVERED IN FANEUIL HALL, BOSTON,

SEPTEMBER 10, 1878.

ELLOW-CITIZENS, - Your chairman has said that I will

FELL

speak to you upon the political issues of the day. Real political issues cannot be manufactured by the leaders of political parties, and real ones cannot be evaded by political parties. The real political issues of the day declare themselves, and come out of the depths of that deep which we call public opinion. The nation has a life of its own, as distinctly defined as the life of an individual. The signs of its growth and the periods of its development make the issues declare themselves; and the man or the political party that does not discover them. has not learned the character of the nation's life. Now, as heretofore, attempts are being made to create political issues. They will all fail. One group of politicians are seeking to find in the reminiscences of the Presidential election of 1876 the political issues of this year. They cannot raise the dead. Others believe they can make State issues the chief topic of this year. But you are about to create the Forty-sixth Congress, and give it the impulse of your aspirations and opinions. The issues are too large for the boundaries of any State. They declare themselves and challenge you to meet them. The issue of this fall for in my judgment there is but one issueis the necessary development of the greatest fact of our century, the war for the Union. That great fact unfolded itself before the American people in four acts:

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First, the war of arms. When that was upon us, it absorbed all other issues and silenced all other controversies. It did not end till the last rebel flag went down in surrender; then the war ended, and men who afterward sought to keep it alive were trying to raise the dead.

Then followed the war of reconstruction, or rather the reconstruction made necessary by the war; and however well it may have been done, or however ill it may have been done, it was done. When the last of the rebel States came back to its allegiance, and had found its place in the national government under the amended Constitution, the war was ended, for better or for worse. That issue cannot be revived.

There was another act of our war which commenced with and continued longer than the war of armies, than the war of reconstruction, it was our war of diplomacy. The entanglements with foreign nations which grew out of the war, and the long and perilous troubles with England, conducted so honorably and so wisely, we saw ended, on the last night of the late session of the House of Representatives, when Congress made the last appropriation to pay the final award due from America. With that act, and the payment it orders, the history of our war of diplomacy is closed forever.

The fourth act of the war was the creation and management of its finances. That began when the first ration was bought for the first soldier; it continued through all the turbulent days. of battle; it continues to-day, and will continue until the last pensioner is paid, and the last obligation is honorably and completely satisfied..

The patriotic citizens of this republic enlisted for the whole war, enlisted to serve till all its acts should end; they enlisted for the war of arms, for the war of reconstruction, for the war of diplomacy; and they will not desert, or be mustered out, until the war of finance is fully settled in harmony with the honor of the nation and the highest and best interests of the American people.

Three great chapters are closed; the fourth, the final chapter, is still open and unfinished. Our finances - the heritage of the war, the need of the hour-are now first in the public thought, and from them no party can divert public attention. Their adjustment is the issue of all issues. Other questions of importance may be discussed, but this cannot be evaded. The reconciliation of the South, the pacification of the country so much talked of, is, in large measure, effected. The Republican party has said, and says to-day, that, forgetting all the animosities of the war, forgetting all its fierceness, it reaches out both hands to

1 See remarks on the Halifax Award, ante, p. 571.

the gallant men who fought us, and pledges all fellowship and brotherhood on this sole condition, — and that condition it will insist upon forever, that in the war for the Union we were right, forever right, and that in the war against the Union they were wrong, forever wrong. We never made terms, we will never make terms, with the man who denies the everlasting rightfulness of our cause. To do that would be treason to the dead and dishonor to the living. On this basis only can pacification be complete. We ask that it be realized; and we shall consider that it is realized when it is just as safe and just as honorable for a good citizen of South Carolina to be a Republican as it is for a good citizen of Massachusetts to be a Democrat.

Other questions will be reached in the order of their development. But to-day, in the foreground of all, is the financial question. To this I invite your consideration.

This great question has two faces. One of them looks back to the war out of which it sprung; the other looks forward to the future of the people and their interests; and the system of finance that settles the issue rightly will respect the past and provide for the future. The finances of the war, fellow-citizens, can be summed up in a sentence. While the nation went into all our homes, and, laying its strong hand upon our bravest and best, took them into the field to die, if need be, it laid the heavy hand of taxation upon us to support and maintain the war. It went to all, rich and poor alike, and asked for contributions to carry on the war. At that time the man who helped the government with his money was regarded almost equal in honor to the man who helped with his life. If you will read the records of that legislation, if you will read the messages of our President, you will find them everywhere praising the patriotism of the citizens who came forward with their money and helped the government. In 1864, President Lincoln said it was a most gratifying fact, that, of eighteen hundred millions loaned to the government of the United States, almost every dollar had been loaned by citizens. He congratulated himself that so many comparatively poor people had put their mites into the loan to help the government; and he went so far as to suggest, in his message for that year, that Congress should pass a law exempting a limited amount of some future issue of public securities from taxation and from seizure for debt, as a means

of encouraging a more nearly equal distribution of the debt, and of enabling every prudent person to set aside a small annuity.

I recall these facts, because we are so apt to forget the events of fourteen years ago.

But taxes and loans, great as they were, were insufficient to supply the enormous demands of war. When the government found they could not borrow money fast enough, in their extremity and distress they took a step that the American nation had never taken before since the Constitution was formed. They took the step of forcing a loan upon the people, to meet the immediate emergencies of the war.

What

I call your attention to the remarkable fact, that when they took that step, in 1862, there are not now known to have been ten men on this continent who did not believe that paper money should be redeemable in coin at the will of the holder. That was a nation of thirty-one millions of Americans. ever has occurred since to change the minds of men has occurred within sixteen years. Now let us take that as the basis of the discussion to-night. No man ever understood better than the men of that day thought they understood the danger of that step. The President of the United States that glorious man, so filled with love for all that is good, and true, and patrioticdeplored this issue of paper money. Every Senator and Representative in Congress deplored the necessity that compelled them to abandon, for the time being, the ground of acknowledged safety, and issue paper that could not be at all times exchangeable for coin. Both President and Congress sought earnestly to avoid the known dangers of such a step. In the first act that authorized the issue of greenbacks, they limited the amount, and provided for funding them in a coin bond. Later, when an additional issue was unavoidable, they made it a fundamental condition that the volume should never exceed four hundred millions, and fifty millions additional for redeeming a temporary loan. That pledge stands in our law to-day, - as yet unbroken, and covers, with its high sanctions, every outstanding greenback. That was not all. They firmly anchored themselves to coin by providing, in the same bill that created the greenbacks, that all our revenues from customs should be paid in coin, and be held for paying the interest on our debt, for paying the bonds issued in connection with the

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