come forward with a proposition to do what? Why we will give the soldier $50 bountyyour attention to this-if he has served two years, and $100 if he has served three years. Now, mark you, the colored man that served two years can get his $100 bounty, but the white man must serve three years before he can get his. [Cheers.] But that is not the point. While they were tickling and attempting to please the soldiers, by giving them $300 for two years' service, they took it into their heads to give somebody else about [laughter], and they voted themselves not fifty dollars, two years' service. Your attention: I want to make a lodgment in your minds of the facts, because I want to put the nail in; and having put it in, I want to clinch it on the other side. [Cheers.] The brave boys, the patriotic young man who followed his gallant officers, slept in the tented field, and perilled his life and shed his blood, and left his limbs behind him, and came home mangled and maimed, he can get fifty dollars bounty, if he has served two years; but the members of Congress, who never smelt gunpowder, can get $1.000 extra pay. Great cheering.] This is a faint picture, my countrymen, of what has transpired. [A voice, Stick to that question."]

Fellow-citizens, you are all familiar with the work of restoration. You know that since the rebellion collapsed, since the armies were suppressed in the field, that everything that could be done has been doue by the executive department of the Government for the restoration of the Government; everything has been done with the exception of one thing, and that is the admission of members from eleven States that went into the rebellion; and after having accepted the terms of the Government-having abolished slavery, having repudiated their debt and sent loyal representatives-everything has been done excepting the admission of representatives, to which all the States are entitled. [Cheers.]

When you turn and examine the Constitution of the United States, you find that you cannot even amend that Constitution so as to deprive any State of its equal suffrage in the Senate. (A voice, "They have never been out."] It is said before me they have never been out. I say so too. That is what I have always said. They have never been out, and they cannot go out. [Cheers.] That being the fact, under the Constitution they are entitled to equal representation in the Congress of the United States without violating the Constitution, [cheers :] and the same argument applies to the House of Representatives.

How, then, does the matter stand? It used to be one of the arguments, that if the States withdraw their Representatives and Senators, that was secession-a peaceable breaking up of the Government. Now the radical power in this Government turn round and assume that the States are out of the Union, that they are not entitled to representation in Congress. [Cheers.] What is to say, they are dissolutionists, and their position now is to perpetrate a disruption of the Government; and that, too, while they are denying the States the right of representation, they impose taxation upon them, a principle upon which, in the Revolution, you resisted the power

of Great Britain. We deny the right of taxation without representation; that is one of our great principles.

Let the Government be restored; let peace be restored among this people. I have labored for it; I am for it now. I deny this doctrine of secession, come from what quarter it may, whether from the North or froin the South. I am opposed to it, and am for the union of the States. [Voices, "That's right," and cheers.] I am for the thirty-six States, representing thirtysix States, remaining where they are under the Constitution as your fathers made it and handed it down to you; and if it is altered or amended, let it be done in the mode and manner pointed out by that instrument itself, and in no other. [Cheers.] I am for the restoration of peace. Let me ask the people here to-night if we have not shed enough of blood. Let me ask, Are you prepared to go into another civil war? Let me ask this people here to-night, Are they prepared to set man upon man, and in the name of God lift his hand against the throat of his fellow? [Voice," Never!"] Are you prepared to see our fields laid waste again, our business and our commerce suspended, and our trade stopped? Are you prepared to see this land again drenched in our brothers' blood? Heaven avert it is my prayer. [Cheers.] I am one of those who believe that man does sin, and having sinned, I believe he must repent, and, sometimes, having repented makes him a better man than he was before. [Cheers.]

I know it has been said that I have exercised my pardoning power. Yes, I have. [Cheers, and What about Drake's constitution?"] Yes I have; and don't you think it is to prevail? I reckon I have pardoned more men, turned more men loose, and set them at liberty that were imprisoned, I imagine, than any other living man on God's habitable globe. [Voice, "Bully for you!" cheers.] I turned forty-seven thousand of our men loose who engaged in this struggle, with the arms we captured with them, and who were then in prison. I turned them loose. [Voice,

Bully for you!" and laughter.] Large num bers have applied for pardon, and I have granted them pardon; yet there are some who condemn, and hold me responsible for doing wrong. Yes, there are some who staid at home, who did not go into the field, that can talk about others being traitorous and being treacherous. There are some who can talk about blood and vengeance and crime and everything to make treason odious, and all that, who never smelt gunpowder on either side [Cheers.] Yes, they can condemn others, and recommend hanging and torture, and all that. If I have erred, I have erred on the side of mercy. Some of these croakers have dared to assume they are better than was the Saviour of men himself-a kind of over-righteous

better than anybody else; and, although wanting to do Deity's work, thinking He cannot do it as well as they can. [Laughter and cheers.]

Yes, the Saviour of men came on earth and found the human race condemned and sentenced under the law; but when they repented and believed, He said Let them live. Instead of executing and putting the whole world to death, He went upon the cross, and there was nailed by

Interview with Chas. G. Halpine, March 5, 1867. And now, apart from the directly political, [continued the President,] what is the main issue loming up in the immediate future? What issue is clearly foreshadowed to be the Aaron's rod which must swallow up all minor questions? It is the great financial issue, the issue of the national debt; whether it shall be paid or repudiated. This issue has fibres extending into the pockets of every citizen; for wherever a man has a dollar, or can earn a dollar, the Government is now compelled to go for its portion of his substance; and with the vast machinery under its control, the money is fetched.

There were four millions of slaves in the southern States before the rebellion, representing a capital of three, or possibly four billions of dollars; but let us calf it three billions, or three thousand millions, as you may please. These slaves represented that amount of property, men put their savings into purchasing or raising them, and they represented as property whatever were the surplus profits of their labor, after due allowance for food, clothing, medicine, and interest on the capital invested.

On this property in slaves gradually grew up that slave oligarchy or aristocracy, against which the leaders of the anti-slavery party so successfully thundered during the twelve years preceding the rebellion; and after the first mad plunge into rebellion, the fate of that aristocracy was sealed. It is now a thing of the past. With its virtues-for it had virtues, courage, and hospitality eminently-and with its crimes of pride and lawless revolution, it has entered into history, and is a thing of the past.

But what do we find? The aristocracy based on $3 000,000,000 of property in slaves south of Mason and Dixon's line has disappeared; but an aristocracy, based on over $2,500,000,000 of national securities, has arisen in the northern States, to assume that political control which the consolidation of great financial with political interests formerly gave to the slave oligarchy of the late rebel States. The aristocracy based on negro property disappears at the southern end of the line, but only to reappear in an oligarchy of bonds and national securities in the States which suppressed the rebellion.

We have all read history, and is it not certain that of all aristocracies, that of mere wealth is the most odious, rapacious, and tyrannical? It goes for the last dollar the poor and helpless have got; and with such a vast machine as this Government under its control, that dollar will be fetched. It is an aristocracy that can see in the people only a prey for extortion. It has no political or military relations with them, such as the old feudal system created between liege

blood under the tax-gatherer's thumb-screw.

To the people the national debt is a thing of debt to be paid; but to the aristocracy of bonds and national securities it is a property of more than $2,500,000,000, from which a revenue of $180,000,000 a year is to be received into their pockets. So we now find that an aristocracy of the South, based on $3,000,000,000 in negroes, who were a productive class, has disappeared, and their place in political control of the country is assumed by an aristocracy based on nearly $3,000,000,000 of national debt-a thing which is not producing anything, but which goes on steadily every year, and must go on for all time until the debt is paid, absorbing and taxing at the rate of six or seven per cent. a year for every $100 bond that is represented in its aggregation.

Now, I am not speaking of this to do anything but deprecate the fearful issue which the madness of partisan hatred and the blindness of our new national-debt aristocracy to their own true interests is fast forcing upon the country. But is it not clear that the people, who have to pay $180,000,000 a year to this consolidated moreyed oligarchy, must, sooner or later, commence asking each other "How much was actually loaned to our Government during the eivil war by these bondholders, who now claim that we owe them nearly $3,000,000,000?" You know what the popular answer must be-I do not say the right answer-"Less than half the amount they claim, for gold ranged at an average of one hundred premium while this debt was being incurred."

Just think of the annual tax of $180,000,000 for payment of interest on our national debt! This Government we have, with its enormous machinery, is a pretty hefty business in itself, costing more per capita to the people than the Government of England, which we always heretofore regarded as the most tax-devouring on earth. But over and beyond the expenses of the Government proper, as it should stand in the scale of peace at about $60,000,000 a year, we have, in the $180,000,000 of interest paid yearly on our national debt, enough to support three such Governments as this, with all their vast machinery and disbursements! We have not only, under the present system, one Government for the people to support, but, over and beyond this, we have to raise by taxation from the people sufficient to support three similar establishments every year!

All property is based upon and can only be sustained by law; and it is for a return to law and the guide of fixed constitutional principles that my whole course has been contending. But so short-sighted is this aristocracy of bonds and paper currency, this Plutocracy of the national debt, that my efforts in behalf of their true interests (which are certainly involved in the maintenance of law and the Constitution) have been every where encountered, and almost everywhere

party whose interest it is, and must increasingly become, o favor repudiation as a policy. To secure the public creditor, our efforts should be, if that were possible, to restrict rather than to extend the right of suffrage; for money rapidly aggregates in a few hands; and whenever the men who have an interest in seeing that our national debt is paid shall have become out of all proportion few, compared with those who have an interest in its repudiation, the votes of the many will carry it, and the debt of $3,000,000,000 will be struck out of existence by ballots, just as rapidly and utterly as the similar amount invested in southern negroes has been abolished during the recent war under showers of bullets. At least, this is possible.

That we are to have a great financial crash this year I hold to be inevitable, though deprecating it, and having used every effort for its avoidance. To say that it can be staved off by any legislation, if the violated laws of trade and public economy call for it, is to assert that water can be made to run up hill, or shall cease to seek its own level under the compulsion of a congressional enactment. Perhaps, for so violent a discase, this violent cure may be the only remedy. It is like a man sustaining his strength on brandy; so long as he can increase the dose daily, he may get along in high good humor, just as we have been prospering on an irredeemable paper currency and fresh issues of public securities. But sooner or later, the day will come in which brandy no longer can stimulate; nor can irredeemable promises to pay pass current as a circulating medium forever To the man will come a severe fit of sickness, teaching him that the laws of temperance can only be violated under fearful penalties, and to the na tion will come a financial crash, teaching it that paper is only a representative of value, not value itself; and that the only true securities for our

public credit must be looked for in a system of rigidly exacted obedience to all constitutional restraints, and a thorough system of economy in all branches of the public service.

For the slights and indignities, the unconstitutional curtailments and dishonors which the recent Congress has attempted to cast upon me for my unflinching and unalterable devotion to my constitutional oath, and to the best interests of the whole country, according to my best judgment and experience, I am only sorry as regards the indignities sought to be imposed on my high office, but unmoved as regards myself. Conscious of only having executed my duty, conscious of being denounced for “usurpation" only because refusing to accept unconstitutional powers and patronage, and satisfied that the day of wiser thought and sounder estimate cannot now be far distant, I look with perfect confidence for my vindication to the justice of that future which I am convinced cannot long be delayed. Unless all the senses are deceptive, unless all truth be a lie, unless God has ceased to live, I tell you that the folly and fraud now dominating the councils of this distracted country in Congress cannot endure for

ever.

It is, perhaps, but right to add that the foregoing is a report from memory of remarks made by Mr. Johnson in an extended conversation yesterday afternoon, and that the original did not take the form of a set speech, here unavoida bly given to it. It should also be added that a few points embraced in the report, and attributed exclusively to the President, may have been, more or less, suggested by interjectional remarks of the person to whom he was speaking; but nothing has been here set down to which the full assent of Mr. Johnson was not given, always provided, of course, that his listener understood him, and remembers correctly.

The Annual Message, December 4, 1866.

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