the silent and effective movements of the men of overgrown estates, the controllers of great monopolies and of centralized wealth, who have lost faith in the people and free institutions and seek the shelter of a strong Government, and the wealth drawn from labor is sought to be employed in vast sums to place your Government, in imitation of the governments of Europe, on a military foundation. Our Government, in the opinion of the new statesmanship, must lean for safety upon the swordnot upon the patriotism, the intelligence, and the manhood of our people.

This extraordinary movement has been for several years silently pressing its theories upon Congress, and now bills involving vast millions of the wealth of our people are demanding a hearing and forcing their way through the Houses of Congress. Warlike supplies, forts, ships of war! Can any man doubt that the ingenious methods by which the public mind has been prepared to accept these measures will soon enlarge your standing army as well as man your enlarged naval establishment? I protest against these measures. Your army as it is-although the occasion for it when established by our fathers, that of protecting our frontiers from the Indian tribes, has, in the main, gone by-I am willing to keep up, and a small and respectable navy, according to the traditional policy of our Government, to meet an emergency that might possibly arise-and such an emergency, according to our experience, may arise at remote intervals-and to keep up the occasional courtesies between our Republic and other nations-a cheap imitation of the customs of feudalism. In this way our small navy has, in our long periods of peace, been heretofore mainly employed.

But I protest even against the beginning of the revolution, silent as it may be, that aims at placing this Republic on a military footing-a revolution involving a change in our system of government, of which even many of the chief actors are, or seem to be, unconscious. If our people, in the dream of peaceful security, shall permit this vast accumulation of wealth in the national treasury to be the pretext and the occasion for entering upon this scheme of military power to bolster up the Government, instead of the old reliance on the patriotism of the people, a reliance sanctified by a century of prosperity and peace such as elsewhere the world has never witnessed, it will be the greatest misfortune that ever befell the human race. The day should be forever accursed that witnessed its beginning.

William McAdoo [N. J.] replied to Mr. Holman,

Mr. Chairman, I deeply sympathize with the efforts of the gentleman from Indiana [Mr. Holman] to be consistent in his efforts in saving the treasury. I wish to say to him that I am as jealous of the growth of military power as the gentleman himself, and if this were a question of the increase of the regular army of the United States beyond what it should be in time of profound peace I would join in protest with him against the passage of the bill.

But there is no man on this floor who knows better than the gentleman from Indiana that the statesmen of the infant Republic, including such men as President Monroe, always drew a clear line of demarcation between a standing army and a navy. The guns of our navy frown over the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific and our Northern and Southern borders, but never imperil the rights or liberties of any citizen of New Jersey or Indiana. It was the remark of one of the most profound of our earlier statesmen that the guns of a navy had never been turned against the liberties of a country and a people, and every dollar of these appropriations for the building of a navy and for the making of guns is for an armament which will be turned not against the country itself but against its invaders. Never against republican institutions, but against foreign aggression-in protecting our coast or defending our citizens abroad.

I believe, with the gentleman from Indiana, that this country never will be successfully invaded by an alien army. But the gentleman from Indiana must himself know that, while our soil may never be polluted by the foot of an invader, the cities on our coast are now at the mercy of the smallest navies in the world.

The gentleman from Indiana says why this great cry from the financial centers (meaning the sea and lake board cities), from the centers where great wealth and population have aggregated there comes up the demand for a navy. The gentleman from Indiana must know that the cause of that cry is because the financial centers and great cities are mostly located at exposed points for naval attack. It is not, for instance, because the capital in New York is threatened by the citizens of New York, but it is because all the people of New York, without regard to conditions, know that the city of New York is exposed to bombardment and destruction by naval powers, which we could neither oppose nor punish. The gentleman says he views with alarm the growth of military power in these efforts to defend our coast and to increase naval armament,

The gentlemen who occupied this House in 1859, and for many years prior to that time, who were true RepublicanDemocrats in the universal sense and stanch defenders of liberty, and as careful of the rights of man as the gentleman from Indiana, did not express any alarm-and we then had about the greatest naval power on earth-that the liberties of the citizens of the Republic were imperiled.

The gentleman from Indiana says we have already made vast appropriations. Well, we have made vast appropriations for numerous new post-offices and river improvements in his own and other States for instance. Does not the gentleman from Indiana know we have reached a crisis in the history of the American navy, that within a few years, and it may be months, about forty-five wooden vessels will, under the 20 per cent. dead line, be cut off the naval register?

A MEMBER. That is the thing the Government ought to bless.

MR. MCADOO.-Yes, but we want something to be put upon our naval list to replace them. We have, to replace them now, only four completed cruisers. Is that a monstrous and improper thing to do? Does that endanger the liberties of the country? If we had thirty new vessels not one additional fighting man would be enlisted. All that is contemplated by the gentleman from Texas is two additional cruisers and four gunboats to those already authorized by law, making eleven vessels of modern design to uphold the dignity of the Republic abroad and its safety at home and provide for the moderate personnel of officers and men of the American navy.

It may be that the gentleman from Indiana is making up in his discussion on the floor in behalf of economical expenditure for some lapses from virtue of a very recent date. [Mr. Holman had voted for expensive public buildings and internal improvements in Indiana.]

And when he brings to the aid of an argument against this very moderate increase of the armament of the navy of the United States an attempt to prejudice the minds of the members of the House by appealing to them as representatives against military power he is doing that which, in my opinion, with all deference and the greatest respect for him, is unfair to the House and calculated to mislead the country. The people of this country have during our whole history stood by the naval establishment, and they are earnest now in demanding its rehabilitation.

No man in these United States, however humble and however

great, and no State of this Union will be in any peril or his or their rights and liberties by this increase of the navy. We are not building up the navy for the purpose of foreign aggression. Our flag, I trust, will never be floated over any foreign soil by way of conquest. God made our country to bless, not curse and oppress, mankind. It is not the policy of this Government to interfere with outside nations, save when they infringe our domestic rights.

But unhappily for us, and unhappily for all mankind, we have not yet arrived at that latitudinarian condition of universal politics wherein wars and rumors of wars have ceased; and when the gentleman from Indiana appeals to this House to arm the defences of the country with nothing more formidable than delusive rhetoric, as if we were in the millennium period, he forgets the divine edict that until the end of time (unfortunately on account of our weak and wicked human nature and the irrepressible conflict between good and evil, and because of the selfishness of nations), the hand of man will be raised betimes offensively or defensively against his fellow-man.

Within the limits of my own country I believe in the doctrine of the fullest individual and local liberty, but I have not yet arrived at that period where I can indorse the sentiment that the nations of the earth have joined together in the bonds of fraternal love and friendship, and that all envy, and hatred, and selfishness, and evil have been eliminated from the heart of man.

It is unfortunate, but it is true, that the selfishness and the cupidity of nations are like the selfishness and cupidity of individual man himself; and that as an undefended country, though the richest in the world, we are exciting the cupidity as well as the jealousy of all the nations of the earth.

As earnestly as any man who loves his kind I deprecate war even when necessary and just under existing conditions as cruel and brutal, and trust that as intelligence and modern civilization advance it may become infrequent and finally cease. On the other hand, the sword has frequently made way for liberty and afterwards defended its existence against its enemies; and as against universalism in politics I am deeply impressed that the spirit of nationality has elevated and ennobled our advanced mankind and secured the freedom and prosperity of people against the incursions of their more ignorant, debased, or vicious neighbors. The mission of nations and races has not yet ceased, much as we may desire the consummated fraternity of all mankind.