Her intelligence enabled her to make her national loan a national blessing instead of a debt, and the industry, thrift, and enterprise of her people have made her $4,000,000,000 in bonds a productive cash capital whose accumulations have increased the principal more than ten times since its creation.
"The Englishman's £20,000 in consols are mortgages, each and all, upon every nobleman's estate and every spinning jenny in Great Britain ; upon every coal-mine and every ship; a mortgage of record upon every mug of beer held in the fist of a working-man throughout the kingdom; a mortgage, signed, sealed, acknowledged, and delivered, on the whole life, ay, on the death and burial, of the people of all England. It is the nationality of this promise to pay, backed up by the most vigilant, distrustful, and thorough system of taxation, for the enforcement of which the whole power of the Government, military and civil, is pledged, that makes British consols the equivalent, practically, of British guineas ; that makes the four thousand million dollars of British debt an addition of four thousand million dollars of money to the capital the kingdom otherwise possessed at the beginning of this century.
" It is precisely so with the war debt of the United States. Seven-thirties are avail able for any enterprise to which unoccupied lands, undeveloped mines, unestablished arts, and unseized commerce, invite Americans. They are cash capital, literally, abso lutely, and without figure of speech. Practically they are cash in bank and cash in the pocket. The artificial measures of their value which stock exchanges have succeeded in instituting, at times, noininally gave fluctuation to their worth as they lie in the bureau-drawers of farmers. But in reality the depreciation of Wall Street does not whittle off the thousandth part of a hair's-breadth from that worth. Those farmers know that they are a first bond and mortgage upon all the United States and on all the people of the United States. But whether three per cent. above par or one per cent. above par, holders of this war debt of $3,000,000,000 can any day and any hour, from San Francisco to New York, and from Portland to New Orleans, convert it into cash.
"Our national debt should be held firmly in place, as the foundation of a system of diversified national industry, which shall relieve us from dependence upon Europe, shall give us the near and cheap home market instead of the distant and costly foreign market, shall double the profits of farming by doubling the markets for farm-products, shall swell the class that is devoted to agriculture,—which is the sheet-anchor of demo cracies,—shall free man by freeing labor, by giving it many markets in which to sell itself to competing bidders.
"A permanent revenue tariff will be necessary to enable us to pay the interest of the debt and meet the current expenses of the Government. This tariff upon foreign manu factures, necessary in itself, is also necessary to sustain the internal taxation and excise system of the country. It is a wall to prevent our domestic manufactures from being washed away by importations. We can have no trustworthy and increasing internal revenue without we have permanent protection.
" The bonds of the United States, accepted throughout the United States as the highest security, and having a uniform value in every one of the States, are the only real and safe equivalent for gold and silver, and the only available basis for a uniform bank-note currency that shall be money all over the Republic. Commerce demands this uniform currency. Politics require it. The money that is at once current in Massachusetts and Alabama, that has par value in Nebraska and South Carolina, in Virginia and New York, that is taken and passed without scrutiny or suspicion by the advocates of slave labor and the advocates of free labor, by extremists in the South and extremists in the North, by the people of the two sea-boards and the people of the Mississippi Valley, has the mission to wear down the sectional barriers which the doctrine of State rights and the partisanship of politics have, for three-quarters of a century, been building up into fortified camps of division and civil war. And the uniform national banking cur rency will perform this mission.