When I expose Repudiation as Confiscation, I mean to be precise.

Between two enactments, one requiring the surrender of property without compensation, and the other declaring that the nation shall not and will not pay an equal amount according to solemn promise, there can be no just distinction.

But analyze the two, and you will see that in each private property is taken by the nation without compensation, and appropriated to its own use.

Here, in plain terms, is repudiation of the interest and indefinite postponement of the principal.

Although, in its present more moderate form, it is limited to payment by existing greenbacks, yet it has the same radical injustice.

Interest-bearing bonds are to be paid with non-interest-bearing bits of paper.

Its proposer would never do this thing in his own affairs; but how can he ask his country to do what honesty forbids in private life?

Another device is to tax the bonds, when the money was lent on the positive condition that the bonds should not be taxed.

It is easy to see that our debt could have been funded without paying more than four per cent., but for the doubt cast upon our credit by the dishonest schemes of Repudiation.

The sum-total of this loss directly chargeable upon the Repudiators is more than one hundred millions, already paid in taxes; and much I fear, fellow-citizens, that, before the nation can recover from the discredit inflicted upon it…

It is hard to see this immense treasure wrung by taxation from the toil of the people to pay these devices of a dishonest Democracy.

Every workman pays it in his food and clothing; every mechanic and artisan, in his tools; every housewife, in her cooking-stove and flat-iron; every merchant, in the stamp upon his note; every man of salary, in the income tax; ay, every…

Many of these taxes, imposed under duress of war, will be removed soon, I trust; but still the enormous sum of forty millions annually must be contributed by the labor of the country, until the world is convinced, that, in spite of…

It is with our country, as with an individual,--the doubt obliges the payment of extra interest.

I do not speak of that patriotic character which commends the national debt, but of the financial principle on which the greenback was first issued.

The national existence depended upon money, which could be had only through a forced loan.

The disloyal party resisted the passage of the original Act, prophesying danger and difficulty; but the safety of the nation required the risk, and the Republican Party assumed it.

And now this same disloyal party, once against the greenback, insist upon continuing in peace what was justified only in war,--insist upon a forced loan, when the overruling exigencies of self-defence have ceased, and the nation is saved.

The case is aggravated, when we consider the boundless resources of the country, through which in a short time even this great debt will be lightened, if the praters of Repudiation are silenced.

Nowhere will it be felt more than at the South, which is awakening to a consciousness of resources unknown while Slavery ruled.

A rate of taxation, per capita, equal to only one half that of 1866, will pay even our present interest, all present expenses, and the entire principal, in less than twenty years.

You may cause incalculable distress, and postpone the great day of peace, but you cannot do this thing.

It will be paid, dollar for dollar, in coin, with interest to the end.

How little do these Repudiators know the mighty resisting power which they encounter! how little, the mighty crash which they invite!

As well undertake to move Mount Washington from its everlasting base, or to shut out the ever-present ocean from our coasts.