fifteen States, where
for many years neither free elections nor free speech had
been tolerated.

If they could, they were to reconcile the North and the South,
estranged by a strife so bitter that even before the War the
life of no Northern man who dared to utter Northern opinions
was safe in half the States of the country, and which had
been intensified by four years of bloody war--bellum plus
quam civile--which had left nearly every household in the
country mourning for its dead.

They were to confront the greatest temptation that ever besets
men of Anglo-Saxon race, a race ever restless and ever hungry
for empire. Hungry eyes were already bent on San Domingo
and Cuba. Good men were rendered uneasy by the tales of Spanish
oppression in Cuba. Men who were looking for the union of
the two oceans by a canal across the Isthmus, or who hoped
that we should extend our dominion in this continent southward,
looked upon the island belonging to the Negro Republics of
Hayti and San Domingo as a desirable addition to our military
and naval strength.

They were to provide for the payment of an enormous debt.

They were to accomplish the resumption of specie payment.

They were to consider and determine anew the question of
currency. What should be the standard of value and a legal
tender for the payment of debts?

They were to get rid of the vast burden of war taxes which
pressed heavily upon all branches of business.

They were to decide whether the duties on imports which
had been laid to meet the heavy cost of war should be kept
in peace and whether to follow the counsel of Hamilton and
his associates in the first Administration of Washington, or
the counsel of the free traders and the English school of
political economics, in determining whether American industry
should be protected.

The people felt that they had suffered a grievous wrong from
England, and that unless there were reparation, which England
had so far steadily refused either to make or consider, the
honor of the country required that we should exact it by war.

The emigrants from foreign lands who had come to our shores
in vast numbers, and were coming in rapidly increasing numbers,
were made uneasy by the doctrine of perpetual allegiance on
which all Europe insisted. They claimed that they were entitled
to protection like native-born American citizens everywhere
on the face of the earth.

The number of civil officers appointed by the Execu