This requires security of person, property, and free religious and
political opinion in every part of our common country, without regard
to local prejudice. All laws to secure these ends will receive my best
efforts for their enforcement.
A great debt has been contracted in securing to us and our posterity
the Union. The payment of this, principal and interest, as well as the
return to a specie basis as soon as it can be accomplished without
material detriment to the debtor class or to the country at large,
must be provided for. To protect the national honor, every dollar
of Government indebtedness should be paid in gold, unless otherwise
expressly stipulated in the contract. Let it be understood that no
repudiator of one farthing of our public debt will be trusted in public
place, and it will go far toward strengthening a credit which ought to
be the best in the world, and will ultimately enable us to replace the
debt with bonds bearing less interest than we now pay. To this should be
added a faithful collection of the revenue, a strict accountability to
the Treasury for every dollar collected, and the greatest practicable
retrenchment in expenditure in every department of Government.
When we compare the paying capacity of the country now, with the ten
States in poverty from the effects of war, but soon to emerge, I trust,
into greater prosperity than ever before, with its paying capacity
twenty-five years ago, and calculate what it probably will be
twenty-five years hence, who can doubt the feasibility of paying every
dollar then with more ease than we now pay for useless luxuries? Why,
it looks as though Providence had bestowed upon us a strong box in the
precious metals locked up in the sterile mountains of the far West, and
which we are now forging the key to unlock, to meet the very contingency
that is now upon us.
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