GRANT, HAYES, AND GARFIELD- 1871-1881 187 



the many speeches he had been making for weeks, morn 

 ing, noon, and night; but soon he threw himself heartily 

 into the subject, and of all the thousands of political 

 speeches I have heard it was the most effective. It was 

 eloquent, but it was far more than that; it was honestly 

 argumentative ; there was no sophistry of any sort ; every 

 subject was taken up fairly and every point dealt with 

 thoroughly. One could see the supports of the Greenback 

 party vanishing as he went on. His manner was the very 

 opposite of Mr. Conkling s: it was kindly, hearty, as of 

 neighbor with neighbor, indeed, every person present, 

 even if greenbacker or demagogue, must have said within 

 himself, &quot;This man is a friend arguing with friends; he 

 makes me his friend, and now speaks to me as such. 



The main line of his argument finished, there came some 

 thing even finer ; for, inspired by the presence of the great 

 mass of students, he ended his speech with an especial 

 appeal to them. Taking as his text the noted passage in 

 the letter written by Macaulay to Henry Randall, the biog 

 rapher of Jefferson, the letter in which Macaulay prophe 

 sied destruction to the American Republic when poverty 

 should pinch and discontent be wide-spread in the country, 

 he appealed to these young men to see to it that this 

 prophecy should not come true ; he asked them to follow in 

 this, as in similar questions, their reason and not their prej 

 udices, and from this he went on with a statement of 

 the motives which ought to govern them and the line they 

 ought to pursue in the effort to redeem their country. 



Never was speech more successful. It carried the entire 

 audience, and left in that region hardly a shred of the 

 greenback theory. When the election took place it was ob 

 served that in those districts where Conkling and Garfield 

 had spoken, the greenback heresy was annihilated, while 

 in other districts which had been counted as absolutely sure 

 for the Republican party, and to which, therefore, these 

 orators had not been sent, there was a great increase in 

 the vote for currency inflation. 



I have often alluded to this result as an answer to those 



