CONGRESS. (SPECIAL SESSION THE SHERMAN ACT.) 





ing these evolutionary processes will havegainr<l 

 our night's work, and you will be called back 

 here again and again, as you are called here now, 

 to undo your work. You can not stop it. Gold 

 is bound to be the ultimate redeemer of all the 

 financial systems of first-class nations in this 

 world, and no legislation short of the community 

 of all the nations can stop it. Anybody who 

 stands in the market places and sees the stream 

 of prices as they go by must be forced to this 

 conclusion. And you, gentlemen, are doing 

 your constituents a great wrong a wrong for 

 which they ought never to forgive you by con- 

 tinually embarrassing the financial system of 

 this country by weak, lame, halting, sickly prop- 

 ositions, such as have been kicked out of the 

 forum of civilized nations the world over." 



Mr. Bland, in the course of his argument on 

 the subject, Aug. 12, said : 



" Many now born, by the time they are voters, 

 will compose part of a nation containing perhaps 

 125,000,000 people, with unsurpassed energies, 

 with a genius nowhere equaled, and with a vast 

 territory upon which those energies and that 

 genius can operate. But a short time ago, when 

 you looked across the Alleghany mountains you 

 beheld the Western wilderness roamed only by 

 the savage and the wild beast. To-day it is 

 teeming with its millions of civilized people, the 

 great Mississippi valley, and when you cross the 

 Mississippi you just begin to enter the great do- 

 main of this country of ours, for more than two 

 thirds of it lies beyond the Father of Waters. 



" And, Mr. Speaker, it is that two thirds of 

 our territory, rich as it is in gold and silver, im- 

 bedded together in the same deposits, in the 

 same mountains, so that you can not extract the 

 one without extracting the other it is that por- 

 tion of our territory that would give us the 

 money that we need, the money of the world, 

 good money, hard money, Democratic money a 

 country that the civilized world must look to for 

 its future monetary supply if it is to continue on 

 what is called the hard-money basis. And yet 

 we are to-day asked to do what? To lay the 

 blighting hand of confiscation upon the millions 

 of people inhabiting that country, to turn them 

 out as tramps upon the land, merely to satisfy 

 the greed of English gold. 



" Oh, my God, shall we do such a thing as that f 

 Will you crush the people of your own land and 

 send them abroad as tramps, will you kill and 

 destroy your own industries, and especially the 

 production of your precious metals that ought to 

 be sent abroad everywhere will vou do this sim- 

 ply to satisfy the greed of Wall Street, the mere 

 agent of Lombard Street in oppressing the people 

 of Europe and of this country f It can not be 

 done, it shall not be done ! 1 speak for the great 

 masses of the Mississippi valley, and those west 

 of it, when I say you snail not do it ! 



" Any political party that undertakes to do it 

 will, in God's name, be trampled, as it ought to 

 be trampled, into the dust of condemnation now 

 and in the future. Speaking as a Democrat, all 

 my life battling for what I conceived to be De- 

 mocracy and what I conceived to be right, I am 

 yet an American above Democracy. 1 do not in- 

 tern 1. we do not intend, that any party shall sur- 

 vive, if we can help it, that will lay the confis- 

 cating hand upon Americans in the interest of 



England or of Europe. Now, mark it. Thw 

 may be strong language, but hc<-<! it. Ti. 

 pie mean it, and, mv friends of Eastern Democ- 

 racy, we bid farewell when you do that thing. 



" Now, you can take your choice of sustaining 

 America against England, American interests, 

 and American laborers and producers, or you 

 can go out of power. We have come to the part- 

 ing of the ways. I do not pretend to speak for 

 anybody but myself and my constituents, but I 

 believe that I do speak for the great masses of 

 the great Mississippi valley when I say that we 

 will not submit to the domination of any political 

 party, however much we may love it, that lays 

 the sacrificing hand upon silver and will demon- 

 etize it in this country. 



" For myself I will not support such a policy 

 here or elsewhere, but will denounce it, and as a 

 Democrat I will denounce it as un-Democratic 

 and un-American, and will ask the people of this 

 country to condemn it as they ought to have con- 

 demned the so-called Democrats engaged in it as 

 the agents, the tools I withdraw that word, but 

 I will say as the representatives, unintentionally, 

 of the money power and the moneyed interests, 

 and not of the masses of the American people. 



" Gentlemen, you can not hold the Democratic 

 party together on that line. You can not pledge 

 yourselves to bimetallism in your platform and 

 ignore it in your legislation. We pledged our- 

 selves in the first place to tariff reform, and the 

 people had a right to expect us to deal with that 

 first. In my part of the country we were told to 

 let silver alone ; that we already had a law on 

 that subject. They said to us : ' Do not disturb 

 that question, but take up the tariff; we are 

 united on the tariff ; let us take up the tariff and 

 reform and reduce it ; the tariff is doing us great 

 injury, let us attend to that first.' We thought 

 that declaration was sincere, and we thought the 

 first thing to be taken up was the repeal of the 

 McKinley bill. 



" Well, now, my people of the Mississippi val- 

 ley believed that you would let silver alone, that 

 you would not try to demonetize it, that you 

 would let it stand where it is ; they believed the 

 tariff would be considered first. But when you 

 come to say that you are going to demonetize 

 silver, let me tell you that this is a bigger 

 question than the tariff or anything else. This 

 battle of the standards is a world-wide question. 

 The question is whether we are to be put upon a 

 gold standard ; and that question is one which 

 in importance is away beyond the year by year 

 regulation of your revenue. 



" We voted the ticket in good faith : we ex- 

 pected that the platform would be carried out as 

 was promised that we would have tariff revision, 

 and that when, we came to the money question 

 it would be regulated according to the Chicago 

 platform ; that we should have the free coinage 

 of silver, which in itself would destroy this make- 

 shift. But, lo and behold ! we find that we were 

 tricked, that we were deceived. And I use that 

 language advisedly. I believe it was not in- 

 tended by our Eastern Democratic friends that 

 tariff reform should be considered first, but their 

 main, if not their sole, object was to nut their 

 hands upon silver and demonetize it, ana let tariff 

 reform take care of itself afterward. And here 

 we are, just in that situation. Reduce the tariff 



