SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS, December 20, 1839.
FELLOW-CITIZENS:—It is peculiarly embarrassing to me to attempt a
continuance of the discussion, on this evening, which has been conducted
in this hall on several preceding ones. It is so because on each of
those evenings there was a much fuller attendance than now, without any
reason for its being so, except the greater interest the community feel
in the speakers who addressed them then than they do in him who is to do
so now. I am, indeed, apprehensive that the few who have attended
have done so more to spare me mortification than in the hope of being
interested in anything I may be able to say. This circumstance casts
a damp upon my spirits, which I am sure I shall be unable to overcome
during the evening. But enough of preface.
The subject heretofore and now to be discussed is the subtreasury scheme
of the present administration, as a means of collecting, safe-keeping,
transferring, and disbursing, the revenues of the nation, as contrasted
with a national bank for the same purposes. Mr. Douglas has said that we
(the Whigs) have not dared to meet them (the Locos) in argument on this
question. I protest against this assertion. I assert that we have again
and again, during this discussion, urged facts and arguments against
the subtreasury which they have neither dared to deny nor attempted to
answer. But lest some may be led to believe that we really wish to avoid
the question, I now propose, in my humble way, to urge those arguments
again; at the same time begging the audience to mark well the positions
I shall take and the proof I shall offer to sustain them, and that they
will not again permit Mr. Douglas or his friends to escape the force of
them by a round and groundless assertion that we “dare not meet them in
argument.”
Of the subtreasury, then, as contrasted with a national bank for the
before-enumerated purposes, I lay down the following propositions, to
wit: (1) It will injuriously affect the community by its operation on
the circulating medium. (2) It will be a more expensive fiscal agent.
(3) It will be a less secure depository of the public money. To show
the truth of the first proposition, let us take a short review of our
condition under the operation of a national bank. It was the depository
of the public revenues. Between the collection of those revenues and the
disbursement of them by the government, the bank was permitted to and
did actually loan them out to individuals, and hence the large amount of
money actually collected for revenue purposes, which by any other
plan would have been idle a great portion of the time, was kept almost
constantly in circulation. Any person who will reflect that money is
only valuable while in circulation will readily perceive that any device
which will keep the government revenues in constant circulation, instead
of being locked up in idleness, is no inconsiderable advantage. By the
subtreasury the revenue is to be collected and kept in iron boxes until
the government wants it for disbursement; thus robbing the people of the
use of it, while the government does not itself need it, and while the
money is performing no nobler office than that of rusting in iron boxes.
The natural effect of this change of policy, every one will see, is
to reduce the quantity of money in circulation. But, again, by
the subtreasury scheme the revenue is to be collected in specie. I
anticipate that this will be disputed. I expect to hear it said that
it is not the policy of the administration to collect the revenue
in specie. If it shall, I reply that Mr. Van Buren, in his message
recommending the subtreasury, expended nearly a column of that document
in an attempt to persuade Congress to provide for the collection of the
revenue in specie exclusively; and he concludes with these words:
“It may be safely assumed that no motive of convenience to the citizens
requires the reception of bank paper.” In addition to this, Mr.
Silas Wright, Senator from New York, and the political, personal and
confidential friend of Mr. Van Buren, drafted and introduced into the
Senate the first subtreasury bill, and that bill provided for ultimately
collecting the revenue in specie. It is true, I know, that that clause
was stricken from the bill, but it was done by the votes of the Whigs,
aided by a portion only of the Van Buren senators. No subtreasury
bill has yet become a law, though two or three have been considered by
Congress, some with and some without the specie clause; so that I
admit there is room for quibbling upon the question of whether the
administration favor the exclusive specie doctrine or not; but I take it
that the fact that the President at first urged the specie doctrine,
and that under his recommendation the first bill introduced embraced it,
warrants us in charging it as the policy of the party until their head
as publicly recants it as he at first espoused it. I repeat, then, that
by the subtreasury the revenue is to be collected in specie. Now mark
what the effect of this must be. By all estimates ever made there are
but between sixty and eighty millions of specie in the United States.
The expenditures of the Government for the year 1838—the last for which
we have had the report—were forty millions. Thus it is seen that if the
whole revenue be collected in specie, it will take more than half of all
the specie in the nation to do it. By this means more than half of all
the specie belonging to the fifteen millions of souls who compose the
whole population of the country is thrown into the hands of the public
office-holders, and other public creditors comprising in number perhaps
not more than one quarter of a million, leaving the other fourteen
millions and three quarters to get along as they best can, with less
than one half of the specie of the country, and whatever rags and
shinplasters they may be able to put, and keep, in circulation. By
this means, every office-holder and other public creditor may, and
most likely will, set up shaver; and a most glorious harvest will the
specie-men have of it,—each specie-man, upon a fair division, having to
his share the fleecing of about fifty-nine rag-men. In all candor let me
ask, was such a system for benefiting the few at the expense of the many
ever before devised? And was the sacred name of Democracy ever before
made to indorse such an enormity against the rights of the people?
I have already said that the subtreasury will reduce the quantity of
money in circulation. This position is strengthened by the recollection
that the revenue is to be collected in Specie, so that the mere amount
of revenue is not all that is withdrawn, but the amount of paper
circulation that the forty millions would serve as a basis to is
withdrawn, which would be in a sound state at least one hundred
millions. When one hundred millions, or more, of the circulation we
now have shall be withdrawn, who can contemplate without terror the
distress, ruin, bankruptcy, and beggary that must follow? The man
who has purchased any article—say a horse—on credit, at one hundred
dollars, when there are two hundred millions circulating in the country,
if the quantity be reduced to one hundred millions by the arrival of
pay-day, will find the horse but sufficient to pay half the debt; and
the other half must either be paid out of his other means, and thereby
become a clear loss to him, or go unpaid, and thereby become a clear
loss to his creditor. What I have here said of a single case of the
purchase of a horse will hold good in every case of a debt existing at
the time a reduction in the quantity of money occurs, by whomsoever, and
for whatsoever, it may have been contracted. It may be said that
what the debtor loses the creditor gains by this operation; but on
examination this will be found true only to a very limited extent. It is
more generally true that all lose by it—the creditor by losing more of
his debts than he gains by the increased value of those he collects; the
debtor by either parting with more of his property to pay his debts
than he received in contracting them, or by entirely breaking up his
business, and thereby being thrown upon the world in idleness.
The general distress thus created will, to be sure, be temporary,
because, whatever change may occur in the quantity of money in any
community, time will adjust the derangement produced; but while that
adjustment is progressing, all suffer more or less, and very many lose
everything that renders life desirable. Why, then, shall we suffer a
severe difficulty, even though it be but temporary, unless we receive
some equivalent for it?
What I have been saying as to the effect produced by a reduction of the
quantity of money relates to the whole country. I now propose to
show that it would produce a peculiar and permanent hardship upon the
citizens of those States and Territories in which the public lands lie.
The land-offices in those States and Territories, as all know, form the
great gulf by which all, or nearly all, the money in them is swallowed
up. When the quantity of money shall be reduced, and consequently
everything under individual control brought down in proportion, the
price of those lands, being fixed by law, will remain as now. Of
necessity it will follow that the produce or labor that now raises money
sufficient to purchase eighty acres will then raise but sufficient
to purchase forty, or perhaps not that much; and this difficulty and
hardship will last as long, in some degree, as any portion of these
lands shall remain undisposed of. Knowing, as I well do, the difficulty
that poor people now encounter in procuring homes, I hesitate not to say
that when the price of the public lands shall be doubled or trebled, or,
which is the same thing, produce and labor cut down to one half or one
third of their present prices, it will be little less than impossible
for them to procure those homes at all....
Well, then, what did become of him? (Postmaster General Barry) Why, the
President immediately expressed his high disapprobation of his almost
unequaled incapacity and corruption by appointing him to a foreign
mission, with a salary and outfit of $18,000 a year! The party now
attempt to throw Barry off, and to avoid the responsibility of his sins.
Did not the President indorse those sins when, on the very heel of
their commission, he appointed their author to the very highest and most
honorable office in his gift, and which is but a single step behind the
very goal of American political ambition?
I return to another of Mr. Douglas’s excuses for the expenditures of
1838, at the same time announcing the pleasing intelligence that this is
the last one. He says that ten millions of that year’s expenditure was
a contingent appropriation, to prosecute an anticipated war with Great
Britain on the Maine boundary question. Few words will settle this.
First, that the ten millions appropriated was not made till 1839, and
consequently could not have been expended in 1838; second, although it
was appropriated, it has never been expended at all. Those who heard Mr.
Douglas recollect that he indulged himself in a contemptuous expression
of pity for me. “Now he’s got me,” thought I. But when he went on to
say that five millions of the expenditure of 1838 were payments of the
French indemnities, which I knew to be untrue; that five millions had
been for the post-office, which I knew to be untrue; that ten millions
had been for the Maine boundary war, which I not only knew to be untrue,
but supremely ridiculous also; and when I saw that he was stupid enough
to hope that I would permit such groundless and audacious assertions to
go unexposed,—I readily consented that, on the score both of veracity
and sagacity, the audience should judge whether he or I were the more
deserving of the world’s contempt.
Mr. Lamborn insists that the difference between the Van Buren party and
the Whigs is that, although the former sometimes err in practice,
they are always correct in principle, whereas the latter are wrong in
principle; and, better to impress this proposition, he uses a figurative
expression in these words: “The Democrats are vulnerable in the heel,
but they are sound in the head and the heart.” The first branch of the
figure—that is, that the Democrats are vulnerable in the heel—I admit
is not merely figuratively, but literally true. Who that looks but for
a moment at their Swartwouts, their Prices, their Harringtons, and their
hundreds of others, scampering away with the public money to Texas, to
Europe, and to every spot of the earth where a villain may hope to find
refuge from justice, can at all doubt that they are most distressingly
affected in their heels with a species of “running itch”? It seems
that this malady of their heels operates on these sound-headed and
honest-hearted creatures very much like the cork leg in the comic song
did on its owner: which, when he had once got started on it, the more he
tried to stop it, the more it would run away. At the hazard of wearing
this point threadbare, I will relate an anecdote which seems too
strikingly in point to be omitted. A witty Irish soldier, who was always
boasting of his bravery when no danger was near, but who invariably
retreated without orders at the first charge of an engagement, being
asked by his captain why he did so, replied: “Captain, I have as brave a
heart as Julius Caesar ever had; but, somehow or other, whenever
danger approaches, my cowardly legs will run away with it.” So with Mr.
Lamborn’s party. They take the public money into their hand for the
most laudable purpose that wise heads and honest hearts can dictate; but
before they can possibly get it out again, their rascally “vulnerable
heels” will run away with them.
Seriously this proposition of Mr. Lamborn is nothing more or less than
a request that his party may be tried by their professions instead of
their practices. Perhaps no position that the party assumes is more
liable to or more deserving of exposure than this very modest request;
and nothing but the unwarrantable length to which I have already
extended these remarks forbids me now attempting to expose it. For the
reason given, I pass it by.
I shall advert to but one more point. Mr. Lamborn refers to the late
elections in the States, and from their results confidently predicts
that every State in the Union will vote for Mr. Van Buren at the next
Presidential election. Address that argument to cowards and to knaves;
with the free and the brave it will effect nothing. It may be true; if
it must, let it. Many free countries have lost their liberty, and ours
may lose hers; but if she shall, be it my proudest plume, not that I was
the last to desert, but that I never deserted her. I know that the great
volcano at Washington, aroused and directed by the evil spirit that
reigns there, is belching forth the lava of political corruption in a
current broad and deep, which is sweeping with frightful velocity
over the whole length and breadth of the land, bidding fair to leave
unscathed no green spot or living thing; while on its bosom are riding,
like demons on the waves of hell, the imps of that evil spirit, and
fiendishly taunting all those who dare resist its destroying course with
the hopelessness of their effort; and, knowing this, I cannot deny that
all may be swept away. Broken by it I, too, may be; bow to it I never
will. The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to
deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just; it shall not
deter me. If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those
dimensions not wholly unworthy of its almighty Architect, it is when I
contemplate the cause of my country deserted by all the world beside,
and I standing up boldly and alone, and hurling defiance at her
victorious oppressors. Here, without contemplating consequences, before
high heaven and in the face of the world, I swear eternal fidelity to
the just cause, as I deem it, of the land of my life, my liberty, and
my love. And who that thinks with me will not fearlessly adopt the oath
that I take? Let none falter who thinks he is right, and we may succeed.
But if, after all, we shall fail, be it so. We still shall have the
proud consolation of saying to our consciences, and to the departed
shade of our country’s freedom, that the cause approved of our judgment,
and adored of our hearts, in disaster, in chains, in torture, in death,
we never faltered in defending.