le of this country, or the
rider is in great danger. You may be allowed to sell your back lands
for some time longer, but the permanent fund for the support of this
government is the imports.

If the people were willing to part with commerce, can the government
dispense with it? But when it belongs equally to the interest of the
people and of the government to encourage and protect it, will you
not spare a few of those dollars which it brings into your treasury,
to defend and protect it?

In relation to the increase of a permanent military force, a free
people cannot cherish too great a jealousy. An army may wrest the
power from the hands of the people, and deprive them of their
liberty. It becomes us, therefore, to be extremely cautious how we
augment it. But a navy of any magnitude can never threaten us with
the same danger. Upon land, at this time, we have nothing--and
probably, at any future time, we shall have but little--to fear
from any foreign power. It is upon the ocean we meet them; it is
there our collisions arise; it is there we are most feeble, most
vulnerable, and most exposed; it is there by consequence, that our
safety and prosperity must require an augmented force.

THOMAS F. BAYARD (1828-1898)

In 1876, when the country was in imminent danger of the renewal of
civil war as a result of the contested presidential election, the
conservative element of the Democratic party, advised by Mr. Tilden
himself, determined to avoid anything which might result in extreme
measures. The masses of the people were excited as they had not
been since the close of the Civil War, and the great majority of the
Democrats of the country were undoubtedly opposed to making
concessions. Thomas F. Bayard, who took the lead in the Senate as
the representative of the moderate policy favored by Mr. Tilden, met
the reproaches sure to be visited in such cases on the peacemaker.
Nevertheless, he advocated the Electoral Commission as a method of
settling the contest, and his speech in supporting it, without doubt
one of the best as it was certainly the most important of his life,
paved the way for the final adoption of the bill. It is no more
than justice to say that the speech is worthy of the dignity of that
great occasion.

Mr. Bayard inherited the equable temperament shown by his father and
his grandfather. He was a warm-hearted man with a long memory for
services done him, but he had a faculty of containing hi