without anything more, from the obligation which justice and humanity impose on every nation, in cases in which it is free to act, to maintain inviolate the relations of peace and amity toward other nations.

The inducements of interest for observing that conduct will best be referred to your own reflections and experience. With me a predominant motive has been to endeavor to gain time to our country to settle and mature its yet recent institutions, and to progress without interruption to that degree of strength and consistency which is necessary to give it, humanly speaking, the command of its own fortunes.

Tho, in reviewing the incidents of my administration, I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors. Whatever they may be, I fervently beseech the Almighty to avert or mitigate the evils to which they may tend. I shall also carry with me the hope that my country will never cease to view them with indulgence; and that, after forty-five years of my life dedicated to its service with an upright zeal, the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest.

Relying on its kindness in this as in other things, and actuated by that fervent love toward it, which is so natural to a man who views in it the native soil of himself and his progenitors for several generations, I anticipate with pleasing expectation that retreat in which I promise myself to realize, without alloy, the sweet enjoyment of partaking, in the midst of my fellow citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free government, the ever-favorite object of my heart, and the happy reward, as I trust, of our mutual cares, labors, and dangers.

ON THE POLITICAL SITUATION

BY JOHN JAMES INGALLS

MR. PRESIDENT:-Two portentous perils threaten the safety, if they do not endanger the existence of the republic. The first of these is ignorant, debased, degraded, spurious, and sophisticated suffrage; suffrage contaminated by the feculent sewage of decaying nations; suffrage intimidated and suppressed in the South; suffrage impure and corrupt, apathetic and indifferent, in the great cities of the North, so that it is doubtful whether there has been for half a century a presidential election in this country that expressed the deliberate and intelligent judgment of the whole body of the American people.

In a newspaper interview a few months ago, in which I 'commented upon these conditions and alluded to the efforts of the bacilli doctors of politics, the bacteriologists of our system, who endeavor to cure the ills under which we suffer by their hypodermic injections of the lymph of independent non-partizanship and the Brown-Séquard elixir of civilservice reform, I said that "the purification of politics" by such methods as these was an "iridescent dream." Remembering the cipher dispatches of 1877 and the attempted purchase of the electoral votes of many Southern States in that campaign, the forgery of the Morey letter in 1880, by which Garfield lost the votes of three states in the North, and the characterization and portraiture of Blaine and Cleveland and Harrison by their political adversaries, I added that "the Golden Rule and the Decalog had no place in American political campaigns."

It seems superfluous to explain, Mr. President, that in those utterances I was not inculcating a doctrine, but describing a condition. My statement was a statement of facts as I understood them, and not the announcement of an article of faith. But many reverend and eminent divines, many disinterested editors, many ingenuous orators, perverted those utterances into the personal advocacy of impurity in politics.

I do not complain, Mr. President. It was, as the world goes, legitimate political warfare; but it was an illustration of the truth that there ought to be purification in our politics, and that the Golden Rule and the Decalog ought to have a place in political campaigns. "Do unto others as ye would that others should do unto you" is the supreme injunction, obligatory upon all. "If thine enemy smite thee upon one cheek turn to him the other" is a sublime and lofty precept. But I take this occasion to observe that until it is more generally regarded than it has been or appears likely to be in the immediate future, if my political enemy smites me upon one cheek, instead of turning to him the other I shall smite him under the butt end of his left ear if I can. If this be political immorality, I am to be included among the unregenerated.

The election bill that was under consideration a few days ago is intended to deal with one part of the great evil to which I have alluded, but it is an imperfect, a partial, and an incomplete remedy. Violence is bad; but fraud is no better, and it is more dangerous because it is more insidious.

Burke said in one of those immortal orations that emptied the House of Commons, but which will be read with admiration so long as the English tongue shall endure, that when the laws of Great Britain were not strong enough to

protect the humblest Hindoo upon the shores of the Ganges the nobleman was not safe in his castle upon the banks of the Thames. Sir, that lofty sentence is pregnant with admonition for us. There can be no repose, there can be no stable and permanent peace in this country under this government until it is just as safe for the black Republican to vote in Mississippi as it is for the white Democrat to vote in Kansas.

The other evil, Mr. President, the second to which I adverted as threatening the safety if it does not endanger the existence of the republic, is the tyranny of combined, concentrated, centralized, and incorporated capital. And the people are considering this great problem now. The conscience of the nation is shocked at the injustice of modern society. The moral sentiment of mankind has been aroused at the unequal distribution of wealth, at the unequal diffusion of the burdens, the benefits, and the privileges of society.

At the beginning of our second century the American people have become profoundly conscious that the ballot is not the panacea for all the evils that afflict humanity; that it has not abolished poverty nor prevented injustice. They have discovered that political equality does not result in social fraternity; that under a democracy the concentration of greater political power in fewer hands, the accumulation and aggregation of greater amounts of wealth in individuals, are more possible than under a monarchy; and that there is a tyranny which is more fatal than the tyranny of kings.

George Washington, the first President of the Republic, at the close of his life in 1799 had the largest private fortune in the United States of America. Much of this came by inheritance, but the Father of his Country, in addition

to his other virtues, shining and illustrious, was a very prudent, sagacious, thrifty, and forehanded man. He knew a good thing when he saw it a great way off. He had a keen eye for the main chance. As a surveyor in his youth he obtained knowledge that enabled him to make exceedingly valuable locations upon the public domain. The establishment of the national capital in the immediate vicinity of his patrimonial possessions did not diminish their value. He was a just debtor, but he was an exact if not an exacting creditor. And so it came to pass that when he died he was, to use the expressive phraseology of the day, the richest man in the country.

At this time, ninety years afterward, it is not without interest to know that the entire aggregate and sum of his earthly possessions, his estate, real, personal, and mixed, Mount Vernon and his lands along the Kanawha and the Ohio, slaves, securities, all of his belongings, reached the sum total of between $800,000 and $900,000. This was less than a century ago, and it is within bounds to say that at this time there are many scores of men, of estates, and of corporations in this country whose annual income exceed, and there has been one man whose monthly revenue since that period exceeded, the entire accumulations of the wealthiest citizen of the United States at the end of the last century.

At that period the social condition of the United States was one of practical equality. The statistics of the census of 1800 are incomplete and fragmentary, but the population of the Union was about 5,300,000, and the estimated wealth of the country was between $3,000,000,000 and $4,000,000,000. There was not a millionaire, and there was not a tramp nor a pauper, so far as we know, in the country,