We are plunging into an abyss from which there are to be no resuscitation and no resurrection." Mr.

The proposed issue of government notes guards against this effect of inflating the currency by the provision to convert them into government bonds, the principal and interest of which, as before stated, are payable in specie.

He said "the country was never so wealthy as to-day; never was so little due to foreign countries; never were the people so free from embarrassment.

He said the legal-tender notes would be "borne up by all the faith and all the property of the people, and they will have all the value which that faith untarnished and that property inestimable can given them.

He "would not overthrow the Constitution in the Senate Chamber while the rebels are endeavoring to overthrow it by war.

If you can violate the Constitution of the United States, in the face of your oaths, in the face of its palpable provision, what security do you offer to the lender of money?

If our country were poor or feeble, without population and without resources; if it were already drained by a long war; if the enemy had succeeded in depriving us of the means of livelihood,--then we should not even pause.

But our country is rich and powerful, with a numerous population, busy, honest, and determined, and with unparalleled resources of all kinds, agricultural, mineral, industrial, and commercial.

The medicine of the Constitution must not become its daily bread.

The premium on gold became the measure of the depreciation of the government credit, and practically such premiums were the charge made for every loan negotiated.

The political effects of the legal-tender bill were of large consequence to the Administration and to the successful conduct of the war.

If it had been practicable to adhere rigidly to the specie standard, the national expenditure might have been materially reduced; but the exactions of the war would have been all the time grating on the nerves of the people and oppressing…

The policy of the legal-tender measure cannot therefore be properly determined if we exclude from view that which may well be termed its political and moral influence upon the mass of our people.

Argument and experience have demonstrated the fallacy of this conception, and averted the evils which might have flowed from it.

But in the judgment of a large and intelligent majority of those who were contemporary with the war and gave careful study to its progress, the legal-tender bill was a most effective and powerful auxiliary in its successful prosecution.

Grateful as was the relief to the people from legal-tender notes, it was apparent to Congress that a government cannot, any more than an individual, maintain a state of solvency by the continuous issuing of irredeemable paper.

Money must not merely be promised, it must be paid.

It was one of the most searching, thorough, comprehensive systems of taxation ever devised by any Government.

Bankers and pawnbrokers, lawyers and horse-dealers, physicians and confectioners, commercial brokers and peddlers, proprietors of theatres and jugglers on the street, were indiscriminately summoned to aid the National Treasury.

The system of internal revenue of which the foregoing is no exaggeration proved in all respects effective.

The amount paid on incomes for a single year reached seventy-three millions of dollars, the leading merchant of New York paying in one check a tax of four hundred thousand dollars on an income of four millions.

They made the distinct and unmistakable issue that a war for the abolition of slavery could not have their support; that the Government of the United States was made for white men, and that negroes could not be admitted to terms of…

The power of the purse controls the power of the sword.

A House of Representatives controlling the power to tax and the power to appropriate could, if hostile to the war, neutralize and destroy all the efforts of the Executive.

He saw that as the Administration was committed to the partial policy which involved all the danger of a re-action and a retreat, it would be wise to commit it to the bold, far- reaching, radical and aggressive policy from which it would…