adopted if they had been submitted to the people in this manner. They have been forced in, seriatim, by fraud, by denying persistently that it was the purpose to impose such measures upon the country, and using the power obtained by such denials. to press upon the country the very measures disavowed before the people. The constitutional amendments have been obtained by coercion in the South, and in defiance of the known will of the people of the North. This, sir, is simply and without any concealment my view of the theory of our government. That Congress has been usurping the powers which belong to the President and to other coordinate branches of the government I have not a particle of doubt. The overwhelming majority obtained by the Republicans in Congress during the Rebellion and afterward, by bringing unauthorized persons into Congress to increase that majority, has sent them headlong upon their career; and they have been and are grasping at every power which was placed by our ancestors in the hands of the President and the courts. Our fathers defined and divided the powers of the government, to prevent all power being grasped and concentrated in the hands of any one of the different branches of government. I believe that the reckless legislation of which the Republican party have been guilty are flagitous violations of the Constitution; and in it the gentleman has been a leader, though he did not begin early to lead in this direction. He began, if I am not mistaken, with the same views of reconstruction as those now held by the Democratic party. But having been converted to this doctrine, he has out-Heroded Herod, and, with the proverbial zeal of a new convert, has gone further than any one else, and signalized himself by the boldness and audacity of his assaults upon the Constitution. What is there in our government now that we can recognize as the government which descended to us from our fathers? I remember reading one of the first contested-election cases which occurred in Congress. It was the case of Mr. Preston, of western Virginia, and he was expelled from his seat because his brother marched a company of troops through the streets of the town on the day of the election. Such was the jealousy with which even the appearance of employing force in our elections was regarded by our ancestors. Now an election is not valid unless it is superintended by the bayonets of the regular army. Our army moves wherever there is an election. They no longer make war upon the camps of the enemies of the government, but they make war upon the political opponents of the administration, and charge upon the ballot boxes and the polls. Mr. President, I was perfectly well aware that this practice, although it commenced at the South, would not end there. The party in power commenced using the bayonets to set up the carpet-baggers in the Southern States, in the reconstructed States. Although those States were at peace, and desired peace more than any other part of our country, still they were not allowed to hold an election without the presence of the army. I knew very well that when the Republican party had accustomed the people of this country to hold elections under the superintendence of military officers and armed troops it would not be a great while before the "political necessity" of the party would extend that practice into the Northern States; and from having originated in the South, in those States which had been in rebellion, it has recently gone into the States which furnished the most. powerful aid and the largest number of men to overthrow the rebellion. Mr. Morton-Will the Senator allow me to ask him a question ? Mr. Blair-Certainly. Mr. Morton-I ask the Senator whether he regards the Fifteenth Amendment as having been adopted, and as now being a part of the fundamental law of the land ? Mr. Blair I should think the gentleman ought to have got my opinion of the Fifteenth Amendment by this time. [Laughter.] I think that the ratification of my own State, for instance, was in legal form, although that ratification was obtained by the most infamous perfidy. General Grant carried the State of Missouri by twenty-five thousand majority, and at the same election the negro suffrage amendment to the Constitution was voted down by thirty thousand majority, and not one-half of the people of Missouri were allowed to vote. The majority in the State of Missouri against that amendment was known to the Senators who sat upon this floor, and the Representatives who sat in the other house, to be probably two-thirds of the entire population of the State; and yet, without any sort of consideration or regard for the will of that immense and overwhelming majority, the Senators and Representatives of the State and the Members of the Legislature hurried to give effect and vitality to this Fifteenth Amendment. The very gentlemen who claim that the ballot is necessary to protect the negro, who attach such immense importance to the ballot, when the ballot has been exercised by their own constituents adverse to their wishes and party interests, disregard it as if it were no more than waste paper. That shows the real opinion of those gentlemen in regard to the suffrage. How much protection did the suffrage afford the people of Missouri, Ohio, Kansas, Michigan, New York, Connecticut, and the other Northern States also, that voted by immense majorities against negro suffrage, against the perfidy and misrepresentation of their Representatives in Congress and the State legislatures which have saddled them with the Fifteenth Amendment, and which the Senator from Indiana well says became a "political necessity" to his party at this crisis? I have enumerated already other States, and I do not wish to call the roll again to show the gentleman from Indiana what my opinion of the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment is. I do not controvert the fact that even the fraud which was successfully practiced in his own State has been placed beyond the reach of any other correction than the rebuke administered by the people in the election of a Democratic legislature, whose resolutions are now under consideration, placing its perpetrators in the pillory of public opinion, and depriving us of the Senator's services as minister to the Court of St. James. This act has probably reached a point where it cannot now, according to the rules of law, be investigated; but I wish to be understood as saying that the people of this country have a right to hold those who have perpetrated these infamies to responsibility. II-34 RICHARD P. BLAND (1835-1899) T IS generally believed that what is known as the "Parting of souri, in the House of Representatives, resulted in what were to many the surprising political changes of the presidential campaign of 1896. Soon after his inauguration in 1893, President Cleveland called an extra session of Congress to repeal the clauses of the Sherman Act which required the purchase and coinage of silver bullion. It was in protesting against the policy suggested by this recommendation that Mr. Bland spoke of the "Parting of the Ways." In copying his speech from the official report, only the argument bearing on abstract questions of political economy has been omitted, while that which explains subsequent political history has been given verbatim. IT THE PARTING OF THE WAYS (Delivered in the House of Representatives, August 11th, 1893) T IS said that history repeats itself, and it seems that the Democratic party is especially the victim of history repeated in some way. When the people intrusted our party in 1884 with the administration of the government, when the Democratic House of Representatives was chosen, I remember full well, and I see around me gentlemen who remember it as I do, for they were here at that time, that before the inauguration of the President of the United States whom we had elected, the emissaries of Wall Street swarmed the lobbies of the House and this capitol, just as they did last winter, demanding-what? Demanding the repeal of the so-called Bland Act. Precisely the same proceedings that we had here last winter! We were told then that it was the wish of the Executive-Elect that that act be repealed, as we were told the same thing last winter. We were told that it was his opinion and the opinion of his advisers that this country was coming then to the single silver standard. If we did not repeal that law, we were threatened with a panic, with gold going to a premium. The House was forced to a vote upon that subject before we were adjourned at that time, as we were practically last winter; but it voted the proposition down by a tremendous majority. During the following summer, the New York papers, as they have been this summer, were filled with predictions of gold premiums and panics. The New York Herald, one of their leading papers, had every day in its columns, "We are still coining the 70 and 75 cent dollar," as a standing advertisement of a panic. Some time in September or October, before the meeting of Congress, these generous bankers in New York, who say that they control the finances of this country and that what they demand must be acceded, made arrangement with the then Secretary of the Treasury by which they were to withdraw $10,000,000 of subsidiary silver coin and to place in the Treasury of the United States $10,000,000 of gold, in order to secure and maintain gold payments, advertising to all the country that the bankers of New York had come to the relief of the Federal Treasury with $10,000,000 of gold to maintain the public credit. It was done, Mr. Speaker, to terrorize the people of this country and, if possible, to bring about a panic such as you have to-day, and they know it. And we met in something of a fi nancial panic; not so severe as it is now, however. The whole country was stirred on the silver question. We met in Congress and the question was debated. The result of it all was the refusal to repeal the silver law by over a two-thirds' vote of that House; and the panic vanished. That was the end of it. When they ascertained that the free people of this country, through their representatives, could not be driven as a herd of buffaloes on the Western plains into a panic, to trample themselves and those depending upon them, they ceased. The howl against silver and the panic stopped. The country continued in its usual prosperity, whatever that may be. We kept on winning these seventy-cent dollars, and no disturbance was made of it, practically, for four years. The Democratic party in the House maintained it against all assaults. But when, unfortunately, our friends on the other side got the power, they enacted another law, repealing the law of 1878. . Now, sir, we are asked here deliberately to repeal that law, and I want to call the attention of my friends on this side of the House, who proclaim themselves to be friends of free coinage |