Republican Economy vs. Democratic Extravagance, SPEECH OF MAINE, IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, JULY 2, 1868. The House being in Committee of the Whole on the Deficiency Appropriation bill — Mr. BLAINE said: Mr. Chairman: \Ve have entered upon a new fiscal year, and the last appropriation bill to provide for its expenditures has been reported and is now before the House. The occasion seems a Gt one for a brief survey of our financial situation and for a pertinent answer to the many misrepresentations so industriously set afloat in regard to govern- mental expenditures. A very labored attempt has been made throughout the country by cer- tain parties and partisans to create the impres- sion that the expenditures of this Congress are on a scale of heedless and reckless extrava- gance. I propose to show that such is not the fact, but that, on the contrary, the expendi- tures are made with far more regard to econ- omy than distinguished the last Democratic administration that was in power in this coun- try. The question is one of figures and not of argument, and hence I proceed at once to the figures. It is important at the outset, to a clear under- standing and clear comparison of Government expenditures at the present time and the period immediately preceding the war, to dis- tinguish between those expenditures which were the inevitable consequence of the rebel- lion, and therefore unavoidable, and those which maybe to a certain extent controlled by the discretion and the fidelity of Congress. Of those expenditures, which are the direct out- growth of the rebellion, I count the interest on the war debt and the pensions and bounties to soldiers and sailors. These are expenditures which are not discretionary but are impera- tively demanded, unless the nation is prepared on the one hand to defraud its creditors, or on the other to turn its back on the brave men who risked everything that the Republic might survive. The annual interest on the public debt amounts to one hundred and twenty-nine mil- lion six hundred and seventy-eight thousand seventy-eight dollars and fifty cents. The pen- sion-roll for the year will be thirty million three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and the bounties due and payable will require about thirty million dollars. These three items, which are not discretionary, amount to the huge aggregate of nearly one hundred and ninety million dollars, well nigh two thirds of our total outlay for the fiscal year upon which we have just entered. The fact that so large a proportion of our expenditure is the result of the war, and is unavoidable unless we repudiate our obligations to our public Creditors and our heroic soldiers, cannot be too often repeated or too thoroughly impressed on the public mind ; for it is idle to denounce those expend- itures as extravagant unless we are prepared to withhold them ; and whoever proposes to withhold them proposes thereby to put the nation at the same time under the doubly dis- graceful stigma of repudiation and ingratitude. If the Democratic party choose to assume that position it is welcome to all the glory of it. For the ordinary expenditures of Govern- ment for the fiscal year which has just begun the appropriations are as follows : Executive, legislative, and judicial, embracing all Department salaries and expenses $17, 180,000 i 1 1 For the Army 33,081,013 10 For the Navy 1, West Point Military Academy Ccnsul ir and d'plum itli service J 2Ci Post Office Department 2 Indian bureau, treaties, .V.c 2,500.000 00 Rivers and harbors 4,700.1 Collecting the revenue 9,969,1 ' Sundry civil expenditures connected with the various Departments 6,020,000 00 M iscellaneous expenses of all kinds, in- cluding cost of certain public build- ings thoughout the country, expenses of reconstruction, expense of closing up Freedmen's Bureau, &o 9,000,000 00 Deficiencies of various kinds in the different appropriations 2,500,000 00 Making a total of. ^ Z Ado D egg' ggg 3 ETUG I differ in some iteme from the recei ie honorable chairman of Ways and ;• 1 think be included in the exp< n of this year a deficiency of thirteen million dol- lars r - - - 1 1 1 1 i 1 1 lt from the Indian war of 1807; which amonnt was appropriated and Bpent last year baa do proper connection whatever with the expenditnres of the currenl fiscal year. be also includes, incorrectly I think, some twenty-four million appropriations overlapping the year which has closed to the present. irrecUy, because this amonnt will be I by a similar amount which overlaps from this year to the next, aboot the same amount going over each year, and this from necessity owing to the mode of disbursement. I have also made the amount I'm- bounties ten millions less than the chairman estimates, because a large proportion which he includes in this year will necessarily be paid in the ensuing year, when it is hoped the whole matter will be closed, the last soldier honorably paid off, and the Treasury relieved from further obligation in that direction. Adding together these ordinary expenditures, as I have above, the sum total is found to be hundred and six million eight hundred and eighteen thousand four hundred and forty- seven dollars. If Congress can be accused of extravagance, the accusation must be made I on these- figures, or else abandoned, for ther expenditures, as I have already re- peated, lie without the pale of congressional i or control. A clear estimate of the character "t" these expenditures may be gath- COmparing them with the outlays in- curred under the fast Democratic administra- tor example, in L857-68 the same class . ws in Buchanan's administration were over seventv million dollars in gold, wh( the one hundred and Bix million eight hundred and eighteen thousand lour hundred and forty- [| dollars above named are in paper. It be observed, moreover, thai in 1857-58 the population of this country was under thirty millions, whereas to-day it is well nigh forty Adding forty per cent, pri . to bringtbe expenditures of the two eras tot' ndard, and we find the outlays of lanan w< re at the rate of over ninety i millions in paper to-day. To this add one third for increase of population, and we find the banan expendil ted to the Id amount to one hundred and thirty million dollars for the ame item that we are paying less than one hundred and seven mil- lions for. And in this calculation 1 bave aid aboul the increased military and naval of the pre eii* dav. which adds immensely account in favor of present economy, calculation, tab d ■■> tie . general -live wl.cn .amine details. Tin 1 Army, for . cost during the four years of Buchan- Iministration, by the official statement of the Treasury Department, which I hold in my hand, the : gate of $80,307,575 55, making an average of well nigh twenty-two millions each year in gold. And at that time the Army consisted in all of nineteen regiments ; so that each regiment cost consid- erably over a million each year in gold. The Army at present contains sixty regiments, and yet the whole appropriation asked for by Gen- eral Grant amounts to little more than thirty- three millions, a trifle more than half a million per regiment each year in paper. In other words, the Army under the peace establish- ment of a Democratic administration imme- diately preceding the war cost per regiment largely more in gold than the Army now costs per regiment in paper under the peace estab- lishment as administered by General Grant. The same scale of expenditure indulged in under the administration of Buchanan would make our present Army cost over seventy mil- lions in gold or a hundred millions in paper ; and until the latter figure is exceeded the Dem- ocratic partisans of Buchanan can have no ground to charge that Army expenses are extravagant. When we look at the actual amount spent for legitimate Army expenses, we see good ground for the high compliment bestowed by President Johnson when, a few months since, he publicly proclaimed "Gen- eral Grant's judicious economy as the direct cause of saving many millions to the Treas- ury.'' With General Grant's election to the Presidency and the final pacification of the southern States, our Army will at once be reduced and the expenditures of the War De- partment will be brought to a point so incon- siderable as no longer to be felt as a burden to the tax-payer. The comparison in regard to naval expend- iture- at the two periods I have named, are equally suggestive and striking. For the four years of Buchanan's administration the Navy, by the official records, cost fifty-two million six hundred and forty-five thousand nine hundred and ninety- eight dollars and eighty-nine cents — showingan average of more than thirteen mil- er annum in gold coin. With a much larger Navy, and with the disadvantageof paper money ami high prices, our appropriations this year ate a trifle under eighteen millions. Tak- difference in the size of the Navy at id I l:e disparity between gold and paper ami we should be authorized, if we followed the Buchanan standard of expend! iture. in appropriating well nigh forty millions for the yen'- Bervice. These facts are cer- tainly BUggestive and instructive. In our Post Office expenditures, as compared with tho teofthe Democratic regime, thediffer- . if anything, more striking than in the relative expenses of the Army and Navy. Be- sidea using up all the postal receipts, the Post Office Department for the three last years of Buchanan's administration made drafts on the Treasury to the amount of over five millions a year, in one year running up to nearly seven millions. During the whole time the Republic- ans have been in power, the drafts on the Treas- ury for the support of the postal service have not averaged two million dollars per annum, and with this moderate expenditure we have been enabled to carry on the immense mail service in the interior of the continent and to the shores of the Pacific, through all our remote Territories and sparsely peopled sections, and have also been able to maintain a superb line of mail steamers from San Francisco to Hong Kong and from New York to Rio Janeiro, none of which extraordinary enterprises and expenditures were levied on the Department during Buchan- an's administration. These comparisons might be quite indefinitely continued, exhibiting in each item the same result, and demonstrating with mathematical certainty that when we take into account the 'vast increase of population and the rapid and unprecedented development of our country during the time the Republican party has been in power, and when we take into further account the fact that we have been all the while sub- jected as a necessity of the war t?o the disad- vantage of high prices resulting from paper money ; taking, I say, these facts into account, I assert and defy contradiction that large as our expenditures have necessarily been they have yet been on a scale of economy and fidelity quite unknown during the last Demo- cratic administration that afflicted the coun- try. And I assert further, and I call both polit- ical friend and foe to the witness stand in support of my declaration, that whenever and wherever General Grant has been able to con- trol governmental expenditure, economy, in- tegrity, fidelity, and rigid retrenchment and reduction have been the unvarying result. Consider further, Mr. Chairman, that while the Republican party has been 'providing the means for these expenditures, they have been at the same time effecting immense reductions in the public debt and continually and largely reducing taxation. Within the three years that have elapsed since the war closed and the Army was mustered out, we have reduced the public debt between two and three hundred million dollars, and at each session of Congress, while this reduction of the debt was going on, we have taken off millionsupon millions of taxation from the productive industry of the tuition. At the first session of the Thirty- Nintn Congress, the first that convened after the close of the war, taxes were removed that had the preceding year yielded a revenue of sixty million dollars, and at. the second session of tin- same Congress forty-one millions more of taxes were promptly repealed. The Fortieth Congress has not been behind the Thirty-Nir] b in this respect, for we have already repeal) d taxes that last year gave us a revenue of niu millions. And to-day the taxes of the Federal Government are so wisely adjusted, and col- lected from such few sources that no man feels them burdensome, oppressive, or exacting. Demagogues may misrepresent and partisans may assail, but the people know and feel that to-day the taxes levied by the Federal Govern- ment arc not an oppression to the individual and not a hinderance to the development of the industrial resources of the land. The history of the Republican party, Mr. Chairman, is indeed a proud record. Inherit- ing a bankrupt Treasury, a dishonored credit, and a gigantic rebellion from the traitorous Administration which preceded their advent to power in 18G1, the Republicans heroically and successfully grappled with and conquered all these obstacles to the life and progress of the nation. They replenished the Treasury ; they. redeemed our credit ; they subdued the mightiest rebellion that ever confronted civil power since Governments were instituted among men ; they struck the shackles from four millions of human beings, and gave them every civil riglu under the Constitution and laws. And while accomplishing these herculean tasks, the Re- publican party administered the Government so wisely that prosperity has been all the time abroad in the land ; great business enterprises have been undertaken and successfully prose- cuted ; factories have been built ; the forest subdued; farms brought under cultivation; navigable rivers improved ; thousands of miles of railway constructed ; the continent spanned by telegraph wires : the two oceans well nigh connected by a road of iron ; the emigrant pro- tected on the remotest frontier ; Territories carved out of the wilderness domain: and new States of promise and power added to the national Union. What other party in the history of this coun- try ever confronted such difficulties? What other party ever gained such victories ? But great as its achievements have been, its work is not yet finished. Out of the fierce conflicts of the recent past, conflicts indeed still ragin_ r , order and harmony, conciliation and friendship, are yet to be evoked ; not, indeed, by unwise concession and timid compromise, but by that firm policy which is based on Bight, and under the leadership of one, who, so terribly earnest in war, is yet to-day the embodiment of peace, the conservator of public justice, the hope of the loyal millions ! mor Seymour's Misstatemeots in regard to Army Expenses. ntatives, ./.■ tie 27, 1868, Mr. Blaine, of Maine, made the fol- .,'..< on a misstatement made by Governor Seymour, of New York, in i boper Institute sp< - ch : oopei • r. I desire bo call attention to a nl made bj Governor Seymour in his ... >b a1 the C -1 in the city of New Xork. In arraigning thr Repub- lican party tor exti he makes the fol- 1 iwing declaration, as reported in the New . World, which 1 hold in my hand : ■ the war closed in 1865 the Government has -. in addition to its payment on principal or interest of public debt, more than one ; million dollars. Of this sum there I . i.rht hundn pent on th nd foi military purposes. This is nearly oal di bt. IMs was Bpent in The charge thus brought by Governor Sey- mour is that in the three years that have trans- our Army and Navy ha* i ight hundred million dol- . or at the rate of nearly two hundred and ity millions per annum in time of pro- foan , The batement is cunningly ■ th I videnl purpose of misleading iblic mind, for while it is quite true that military and naval i Bince the i « bat i b en eighl hundred mil- is absolutely untrue that they , hundred and Beventy millions inum. . the war closed by the sum <-\i of April, 1865, the armies of the Union bore the names of nearly a million men be rolls, and our Navy, in its vast and ed nwm -in xxHxnn