ach thousand dollars collected and disbursed of
six dollars and ninety-eight cents against forty cents during Grant's
first term and twenty-six cents during the three years of his second,
while current expenses under Buchanan amounted to one dollar and
ninety cents per capita to one dollar and seventy cents under Grant.
In ten years, he added, $800,000,000 of the debt had been paid,
nearly $50,000,000 of interest saved yearly, and the taxes reduced
$262,000,000 per annum.

[Footnote 1524: Delivered at Utica, October 3. See New York papers,
October 4.]

Of civil service reform Conkling said nothing. He made a clear, sharp
issue on the resumption of specie payment, however, showing that the
demand for a repeal of the Act's most important feature was a bid for
the votes of soft-money advocates. The Southern question assumed even
greater importance. Tilden depended for success upon the Southern
States plus New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. This was
Dorsheimer's argument, put with characteristic grace and force at St.
Louis. The North had cause to fear, it was argued, if a solid South,
strengthened by States controlled by the great majorities in and about
New York City, could elect a President. The charge that Tilden
intended indemnifying the South and assuming the Confederate debt
increased the anxiety. Conkling's reference to the repayment of direct
taxes, the refund of the cotton tax, and the liquidation of Southern
claims mounted so high into the hundreds of millions that Tilden
deemed it prudent to issue a letter pledging an enforcement of the
Constitutional Amendments and resistance to such monetary demands.

Personal criticism of Tilden exploited his war record, his reputation
as a railroad wrecker, and his evasion of the income tax.[1525] The
accusation of "railroad wrecking" was scarcely sustained, but his
income tax was destined to bring him trouble. Nast kept his pencil
busy. One cartoon, displaying Tilden emptying a large barrel of
greenbacks into the ballot box, summed up the issues as follows: "The
shot-gun policy South, the barrel policy North;" "The solid South and
the solid Tammany;" "Tilden's war record--defeating the tax
collector." George William Curtis asserted that the Democrats of South
Carolina meant to carry the State for Tilden by means of "the shot
gun," declaring that "Jefferson Davis and the secessionists merely
endeavoured to enforce with bayonets the doctrines of Mr.
Tilden."[1526]