private, and to restore the dominion of the Constitution and the laws. 1 | ceipts and disbursements from January 1, 1834, to June 30, 1875; and also the amount of defalcations in gross and the ratio of losses per $1,000 to the aggregate received and disbursed, in answer to a resolution of the Senate of February 9, 1876. I have caused this official statement to be tabulated so as to show the exact state by presidential periods, and I commend it to my Democratic friends as excellent reading for the vacation, and insert it here in my remarks. | What promises, Mr. Speaker, from the party press. the party conventions, and at the bustings! Promises are the cheapest of all cheap curren y; they cost nothing to make, nothing scatter lavishly and broadcast, and as some one says, “Proses are the money of fools. "Let the Democrats into power," said they, "and the good times will come; official corruption shall be stopped; business shall be revived; fields shall groan with golden harvests, foreign commerce be restored; internal transportation shall be simplified and cheapened money shall be solid, abundant, and beap; aines shab be restored; taxes shall be reJuced, retrenchment inaugurated, and the Government conducted on the soundest and most economial plans. The South shall groan no more: the great problem of labor and capital, the great struggle of life and liberty, still going on in that section, shall be harmoniously settled, and all feuds and quarrels of race, citizenship, or ownership of property shall disappear nuder the overshadowing and benignaut wings of the new Democracy." A real civil-service storm should be effected; Cæsarisin, persoual gov¬ | ${ erùment, offices as rewards for personal service, all these and all other evil things should | Gross receipts perish before the dawn of the new day. These were among the inducements held oul to the people to „'orify the beginning of the second century byth ugress of a Democratic majority into the House of Representatives, and these, with not a little of that judicious violence which the Anglo-Saxon deems himself privileged to use toward a weaker people and which was used so far as deemed necessary in more than one State of હતું the Souththese causes and these means bringht the present majority into this House. First and foremost among the partisan eries was that of universal corruption among Republican office-holders. A charge easy to make; for general condemnations are the refuge of ignorant malice. Is it true? No man denies that always, at all times and in all parties, some bad men obtain places of honor and emolument, and disgrace by their misconduct and their venality themselves and their frisuds It was so in the times of Washington ani Jefferson, and every other President the nation ever had. High names might be recalled from the distance that gives oblivion that were polluted by jobbery and bribery. Statement showing the receipts and dis- But fortunately we have official documents that show in rare contrasts the fidelity and honesty of official meu since 1834. On the 19th day of June, 1876, the Secr tary of the Treasury reported to the Senate o the United Poffice disbursements.. States a full and detailed stateinent of re 08 8 34 15 1. 30 784 1 99 75 5 88 6.92 Statement showing the receipts and disbursements | FROM JACKBON'S SECOND TERN TO THE EXƆ OF of the Government, etc.-Continued. BUCHANAN'S TERM. Gross total receipts and disbursements from January 1,1834, to June 30, 1961 -82.950, 454, 326.44 includes loans and Post Office; $2,250,356,731.04 excludes loans and Post Office. Gross total losses for the same period, (no loss Gross fotal loss on $1,000, including loans and Gross total loss on $1,000, excluding losas and UNDER LINCOLN, JOHNSON, AND GRANT. Gross total receipts ad disbursements from July 1, 1861, to June 30, 1875-425,576,202, 805.58 includes loans and Post Office: 89,701,614,481.43 excludes loans and Post Office. Gross total losses for the same period, (no loss Gross total loss on $1,000, including loans and Gross total loss on $1,000, excluding loans and It appears, then, from the official records of the Treasury Department, prepared in obedience to an order of the Senate, tha Loren The gross total of receipts and $2,900,151,326 14 .$2.250,356,731 04 10,243,354 00 The gross total of receipts and 7 04 Under Lincoln, Johnson, and Grant both receipts and disbursements were infinitely larger, and yet the gross amount of losses was smaller and the percentage almost ridieulously disproportioned. Thus -- The gross total of receipts and $26,876,202,805 $2 On the same, including loans and 9,701,614,481 13 14,666,776 07 87 1 61 Thus under Democracy in its purity before the war, and under Republican administra tion including the war, the receipts and disbursements of the first, including loans and Post Office, were about one-ninth of the sec June 30, 1861...$1,369,977,502 52 12,361,722 91 $9 02 ond; the receipts and disbursements of the first, including loans and Post Office, were about one-fourth of those of the second; wh le the losses and defalcations of the Democratic period were nearly ten times as great when 576,109 78 3 04 the loans and Post Office are included, and 418,172 69 1 38 | four-and-a-half times as great when those itemme are excluded, But the table bears closer investigation, | sented to the proper tribunal by the active and you will find, Mr. Speaker, that the co-operation of the Republicans in the nearer you come to this actual time in which | House. we live, to this present, existiug, muchabused Administration of President Grant, the standard of honor and fidelity, as measured by the official reports, becomes higher and firmer. The very lowest rate of losses ever reached is in this present Presidential term: On receipts... On disbursements. In the Post Office........ .22 .26 .53 and this tabular statement stands in grand constrast with the record of any President of any party who has ever preceded President Grant. So much for the charge of gross official dishonesty reaching throug] and corrupting the entire Republican party. The official tables give the lie direct to this wholesale campaign You are now trying, Mr. Speaker, by a most singular report from the Committee on Naval Affairs to smirch the reputation of another officer to whom neither the committee nor the House dare give the benefits of crossexamination of witnesses and of an open impeachment and a fair trial before the Senate and the nation. Sir, the injustice, the gross partiality, the secret inquisitions of the committees of this House are justly a stench and an offense to the American people. Above all things they like fair play, and that is what the Democracy have most carefully refused in the whole course of these examinations. The next of the Democratic war-cries was and is retrenchment. How have you fulfilled this pledge? The House of Representatives accusation. delegated its legislative power to the ComYet in face of these known facts the Dem-mittee on Appropriations. The rules posiocratic party in the House organized them-tively demand that that committee shall reselves into a scandal-making machine, took upon themselves the office of professional slanderers, and charged every one of the regular committees of the House, and many special ones, with this unsavory business. Public business has been willfully neglected; public necessities ignored, and the whole weight and power of Congress devoted to the manufacture of political capital for the pending election. Every broken official kicked out for thievery, every cashiered officer, every nameless vagabond was invited, solicited, urged to testify. Partly for revenge, partly for witness fees, partly for cheap notoriety, these birds of evil omen flock to the Capitol, thronged the corridors, took possession of the committeerooms and of the committees, prompted questions, invented answers, retailed old scandals picked up second-hand, the dead refuse of the streets, to be greedily swallowed by the ouths that stood agape for such carrion food. port in thirty days from the commencement of the session or give their reasons in writing for the delay. In contempt of the rules, many months were spent before any report was made; not that it was difficult even for that committee to make appropriations according to law, but because they sought to make new law, to break up organizations, and to make radical and perilous changes. They finally reported crude and ill-considered bills; they lopped off salaries from teachers at West Point; they failed to provide means for the cadet hospital; they pinched the cadets themselves on their small allowance, and immortalized themselves by abolishing the only military band supported by the United States. They struck the diplomatic and consular service in a manner so ignorant and illadvised as to call forth a most severe and well-deserved rebuke from a party friend and leader, the gentleman from New York, [Mr. HEWITT.] But his correct knowledge and his clear explanations were in vain; the House sustained the committee. They crippled the civil service by a pretended economy and invented the great labor-saving principle of a horizontal reduction of salaries and of number of clerks. It was so much easier to say strike off 20 per cent. in number and 10 per cent. in salary than to inquire carefully and laboriously what each branch of the service actually needed. Arithmetic is cheaper than states The common rights of individual citizens vere grossly violated, the sanctity of private Correspondence outraged, the telegraphic messages unlawfully forced from their proper keepers, citizens imprisoned by order of the House for no valid reason, and all the rights of private individuals secured by the Constitution trampled down by the decree of the House of Representatives. Secret sessions were held, parties, charged with wrong-doing kept in ignorance, and the poor privilege granted to all criminals of an open investiga-manship. With full knowledge that every tion and of meeting witnesses face to face was denied. In all this one single and most melancholy case of official misdoing has been undeniably made known, and that kas been fairly pre head of every Department and of every Bureau protested that they had already gone to the last possible reduction of force in the schedules presented by them to the committes, they stuk to the “rule of three.” Knows ing that the Pension Office was more than a committees, but have surreptitiously and in year behind on its work, that the Surgeon-detail appointed more clerks than ever beGeneral was behind ten thousand pension fore known. cases for want of clerical force, they reduced both offices still lower, and postponed still further the hopes of the starving applicants. And the House of Representatives sustained the committee. They struck the Army--it was natural they should; they ignored the Military Committee and cut down the force to 22,000 men. They undertook dangerous legislation in relation to rank, pay, organization, the proportion of the several arms, and other subjects, and the House sustained them. You have twice exhausted the contingent fund of the House by needless and extravagant sums expended for witnesses en trivial matters, and have run up bills to be met hereafter of frightful amounts for making and printing your investigations. You have insulted the President by resolutions demanding his authority for the exercise of his official functions outside of the city of Washington, and have been ignominiously convicted of ignorance of law and of history by his crushing reply. You have demanded elaborate reports on all manner of subjects from the Departments and hindered the public service by exacting these replies on matters which had already been officially reported and were in print. So much for sins of commission. You have had a session of eight months; what single thing can you show of public benefit? What work has been accomplished, what real reform inaugurated ? But, sir, time would fail me to dissect the random, rash, and blundering legislation of this committee and of the House. No sane man on that committee or in the House believed that these radical and sweeping changes would become laws. They were never meant to be. They were intended by their authors to be overridden in the Senate and yielded by the House; they were as tubs thrown to the whale, or as the gentleman from New York [Mr. Cox] said at Saint Your attention was called both by the Louis and afterward in the House, "We can President and the Secretary of the Treasury do without an army until after election.” to the practicability and advisability of fundThe whole thing is only obtaining crediting the public debt at 4 per cent. To do under false pretenses; a robbery of ill-paid and hard-worked clerks, who really do the work, to bolster up a sham reputation for economy. this would be the greatest possible relief to the nation, for it is the interest on the debt that kills. Many bills looking to this end went to the Committee of Ways and Means, but we have no report and no action. Is this looking after the interests of the people ? The great question of cheap transportation, although reported on by the proper committee, has been utterly overslaughed, and the House has refused and neglected to consider it and still refuses and neglects to do so. How has this House applied civil-service reform in its own appointments? Has it retained competent officers or appointed new ones for the sole consideration of fitness? Sir, the advent of this Democratic House to power was signalized by a pilgrimage such as has not been seen before. Lean, gaunt, famished by long abstinence the multitude The great question of currency, embracing of applicants passed belief. From Maryland in its scope the very life-blood of national to Texas came the hordes of office-hunters ou prosperity, has been dallied with and trifled the trail of their unhappy patrons, whose with until the country finds as little hope for life they made miserable by brazen impor- | relief in this double-faced committee as they tunity. They trooped to the plunder as the find in the double-headed presidential ticket vultures seek the carcass. You selected a of the Democratic party. All convictions, if Doorkeeper on the sole ground of his ex- any there were, on this question have been perience in the same capacity in the Confed-smothered and subordinated to success by erate congress, and you summarily turned false pretenses in the approaching camhim out because he honestly wrote to a pri- | vate friend what you all felt but dared not say: that office was a good thing to have. It was hard on Fitzhugh, for he was not the only man on the floor that felt "biger than old Grant." You turned out clerk after clerk, gray and experienced in duty, and filled their places with partisans. You removed disabled Union soldiers and filled their places with others of another stripe, and would have made a clean sweep but for the popular indignation. You refused at first clerks to some of the paigu. But the temper and purposes of this House are best shown by its debates. Professing large and true devotion to the Union, this Democratic majority has listened to and applauded the most violent denunciations of the party and the men who saved the national existence, to defiant announcements of a "united South," and to justifications of rebellion and vindication of treason. It has heard and applauded the denial in practice of the rights secured by the constitutional amendments and the assertion of the civil and political supremaey of one race and the and Mississippi has been lost to freedom and nationality by the unsparing and murderous use of brute force.. foredoomed inferiority and subordination of the other, and has tried by interpolation into the appropriation bills to repeal the law giving to the nation some supervisory power Aud gentlemen from the South rise here over elections in our great cities and in the day after day and ask whether we do not Southern States, and thus crush out the chief | know that it is their interest to treat labor barrier against fraud and violence against kindly. Certainly it is their interest; but | the citizen. they are not the only people who are not wholly governed either by reason or by interest. Prejudice and passion are large factors in human life and human action. It is a man's interest and his highest duty to treat kindly his wife, the mother of his children; yet how many poor heart-broken women suffer daily agonies from all manner of brutality and abuse from their natural and legal protec This House has overruled clear principles of law in unseating Republican members and in retaining Democratic ones, and have thus nullified the voice of the people clearly and fairly expressed. In looking over the entire record of this session I find no measures of public utility, no question of general importance, perfected, and few if any considered by committees.tors. Any day in our crowded cities you Thus the people behind us and who are our judges will pass upon this first attempt to revive Democratic power, and their verdict will be that it is a sad exhibition, a bad and desperate failure. There are pending in this House & vast uumber of bills seeking relief, nearly all from the theater of the late war: bills for the remission of the cotton tax and its repayment; bills for damages done by marchIng armies, the amount of all which will figure to hundreds of millions; bills to relieve postmasters and mail contractors; bills to repeal restrictions upon commissioning Confederate officers in our Army; bills seeking compensation in all manner of ways for those who suffered because they first rebelled. | can see some human brute, whose very living depends on his horse, overload him, torture him, flog him, and in mad passion cripple and kill him. It was clearly his interest to treat him kindly, but he does not do it. And yet neither wife nor horse could provoke such evil passion as the enfranchised, perhaps defiant, slave can call up in the seured temper of the discrowned master. It is not possible for the best of the race educated as slave-owners to bear with absolute patience the equality and perhaps the rivalry of the other. Nothing but law backed by power can muzzle these dangerous pas sions and force them to die off in ineffectual murmurs, And in the ordinary jurisprudence of the affected States there is no such live, effective law, and no power to sustain it. These, sir, are to wait until after elec- | tion," with the implied if not the express What white man has been brought to juspromise of Northern Democrats that in the tice for all these most miserable of all possible event of success in that election they shall forms of murder Public opinion sustains be favorably considered. them, and they walk the streets to-day unwhipped of justice. And then, when force and violence has had its full work, when the freedom of elections has been trampled down by armed violence, when 30,000 voters have been bullied into silence in one single State, gentlemen who owe their seats in this House to these great wrongs say, behold the peace and quiet which reign in this Democratic State! They remind us of the condensed sarcasm of Tacitus, "Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant"--they kill all opposition, and have the quiet of the grave. The majority of this House has defied the clear sentiment of the nation, has insulted the enthusiasm of the North, has trifled with its unwavering devotion and its vast sacrifices to maintain the Union, and has shown again the sickening sight of that wretched yielding on great questions to the imperious demands of the South, which first wou and now continues the well-fitting title of dough face. A committee of this House two years since visited Mississippi on the Vicksburg massacre, took testimony, and made their report. They warned the country of the proposed line of conduct of the whites of that State; they exposed the organization of armed force to intimidate voters and carry elections; they prophesied precisely what has come to pass. But the cheap politicians of the Northern Democracy laughed at the proofs of murder, cold-blooded and designed; they raised the ory of the "bloody shirt;" they denied the sworn facts, and ridiculed the alleged combinations. Time has vindicated the truth | Sir, the violent and forcible suppression of the popular will in any State is the highest of crimes against society and the nation. It was thus that, in Texas and Tennessee and other States in 1861, the killing without law or warrant of Union men made them harmonious in secession; and if they did not scruple to use these bloody measures on their own race and people, shall they stop now as against an intrusive people, whose presence in their midst is a badge of subjugation and a skoloton reminder of lest dominion? No. |