Mr. Kelley (1814-1890).  I rise to a question of privilege.

The Speaker pro tempore.  The gentleman will state it.

Mr. Kelley.  I send to the desk the Record of this morning and ask the Clerk to read the two paragraphs I have marked in the speech the gentleman from Ohio made on the 6th instant.

The Clerk read as follows:

Mr. Garfield said:

Mr. Chairman:  It is not of my seeking or according to my desire that any interruption of work on the appropriation bills is made by general debate;  but the House by unanimous consent allowed the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Kelley] two hours and a half yesterday, which he devoted to the criticism of a speech which I made one hundred and nine days ago against the repeal of the resumption act, and if I take an hour to reply I can hardly be charged with a wanton delay of the public business.

I am laboring under the same embarrassment I was under on the 16th November, when I replied to some points made by the gentleman from Pennsylvania.  His speech then was withheld from the Record, and I was compelled to reply to it as I remembered it.  And now, after the speech, which was mostly if not all in manuscript and for aught I know has been many weeks ready for delivery, was read deliberately to the House, it does not appear in the Record of this morning;  and I am again compelled to trust to my memory of it, to the few notes I made while he read it, and to the brief notice contained in the morning papers.  If I shall in any way misrepresent his statements the fault is mainly his own.  I am also embarrassed now, as I was in November, by the fact that the gentleman himself is not here, for I dislike to make reference to a member in his absence.  But he sat in the committee-room of Ways and Means for two hours this morning, and he knew that I had the floor and that I must speak now, if at all.

Mr. Kelley.  That is all for the present.

Mr. Speaker, a personal explanation is always a disagreeable duty, but at times it becomes an imperative duty.  The paragraphs just read have in substance what went to the country from the reporters' gallery on these points, but the language is toned down.  It is not what I found in the papers of the country, and is, I am assured by gentlemen who listened to the speech, much more moderate than that which was uttered upon the floor.

I plead guilty to a lapse of one hundred and nine days between the speech of the gentleman of November 16 and my reply to it, but he will bear witness that though I had not heard his speech, as soon as I could read it and meet him I gave him notice that I would reply to it;  and further that when I saw it announced that he had been invited to go to New Hampshire to reply to the letters of Hon. William E. Chandler, and had accepted the invitation, I begged him not to go until I should have made my reply.  It is, in fact, owing to my apprehension of his departure on that mission that he was not able to say one hundred and twenty or probably one hundred and thirty days.  For, sir, on the 8th of November I met with an accident which came well-nigh, I am assured by my physician, crippling me for life.  It was a wet day.  I was hurrying on business for my constituents, and leaving the Interior Department I trod upon a substance that had softened, my foot went from under me, and I fell in such a way as seriously to injure my spine.  I did not appreciate the possible consequences of the fall, though my physician did;  and on the following Thursday, a week after the accident, I, against the protest of my physician, performed what I believed to be a duty to my constituents and the country, and made my argument in favor of the repeal of the resumption act.  It proved to be an act of temerity, for I soon found myself unable to rise from my bed;  and since then during the whole one hundred and nine days referred to by the gentleman I have been the victim of incessant and for many days at a time of more intense pain than I had ever endured through a day in my life.  And yet I have striven to perform in some sort of a way my essential duties as a member of the House.

On the day on which the gentleman spoke, when he said I had passed two hours in the committee-room, I had occupied a lounge in that room in a recumbent position, but watching each step in the proceedings of the committee and giving its councils my best suggestions.  Before it was determined to hold daily meetings of the committee, I had come to the room on Thursday after having been lifted from my bed and assisted to a carriage and lain there through the session of the committee to go back to my bed and remain until the next Saturday morning when the committee would meet again and by the same process had been enabled to meet it and returning to my bed immediately had lain there until Monday morning when the committee was to meet again.  And on most of the days on which we have met the gentleman has seen me physically unable to move about the room with freedom.  Anxious as I have been to be on this floor and to attend to the private business of my constituents I have been wholly unable to do so.

When the vacation came I went to my home hoping for rest and the tender offices of my family;  but I found my son, the only one who ever grew to manhood, and who had just crossed its threshold, the victim of an assassin's shot, from the effect of which his life was saved as by a miracle, and with an operation before him which kept him under the surgeon's knife and instruments for more than fifty minutes.  Concealing my own condition from my family, I devoted myself to him, who, needing the appliances of the hospital and the presence at any time of its surgeons, was away from home and deprived of his mother's gentle offices, until I was utterly prostrated.  I left my bed after days of confinement to return to Washington.  So that but for the gentleman's purpose of replying to Chandler's letter in New Hampshire the substance of my speech would still be concealed in the notes from which it was uttered.

I feel that it was hardly just in the ·gentleman having associated with me in the committee under these circumstances to send to the country through those accurate reporters the impression that I had been one hundred and nine days preparing to reply to his speech.  Said he:

I am laboring under the same embarrassment I was under on the 16th November, when I replied to some points made by the gentleman from Pennsylvania.

Yes, sir;  I was not here.  The effort had been too much for me.  I was away, and at my bedside I revised the notes of my speech while the gentleman was speaking.  But had be preferred to ascertain the points and averments of the speech before he referred to them, or rather had he not relied upon his inner consciousness as the source from which to obtain facts and waited until the next day, he would have had before him in the Record what I had said;  and could have replied to it.  There was, then, no necessity laid upon him of replying immediately and without examination of my remarks, as there seems to have been on the 6th instant, when he was to speak by favor.

His speech ---says the gentleman--- then was withheld from the Record, and I was compelled to reply to it as I remembered it.  And now, after the speech, which was mostly if not all in manuscript and for aught I know has been many weeks ready for delivery, was read deliberately to the House, it does not appear in the Record of this morning;  and I am again compelled to trust to my memory of it, to the few notes I made while he read it, and to the brief notice contained in the morning papers.

Now, sir, there are sources of information better than a man's own inner consciousness, and if he had inquired of any one of the five gentlemen at the reporters' desk he would have learned that the speech was not all or any part of it in manuscript.  Here [holding them up] are the flimsy notes from which it was made which were thrown into my desk at its conclusion and which gentlemen may examine if they please.  He says I spoke two hours and a half;  it would hardly have taken me that time to read what is scrawled so loosely upon these thirty pages of paper.  Not only the reporters --for we kept them late in the afternoon-- but their assistants could any and all of them have told him that the imputation that the speech was in manuscript and was intentionally withheld from the next morning's Record by a man as infirm as he knew me to be was utterly without foundation.

But I am told, Mr. Speaker, by gentlemen that his statement on this point was more emphatic than that which I have quoted, and the reports of the leading newspapers of the country confirm the reports of the gentlemen who listened to him:  "It was a prepared speech." --I do not pretend to quote his language, for I did not hear him-- "had been in manuscript for weeks, and was deliberately read."

I now ask the Clerk to read from the marked passage on page 4.

The Clerk read as follows:

Mr. Chairman, here is a little history which I wish to read.  The years he named were 1865 and 1866.  On the 18th day of December, 1865, the following resolution was introduced into the House of Representatives:

"Resolved, That this House cordially concurs in the views of the Secretary of the Treasury [Hugh McCulloch] in relation to the necessity of a contraction of the currency, with a view to as early a resumption of specie payments as the business interests of the country will admit;  and we hereby pledge co-operative action to this end as speedily as practicable."

Here are the yeas and nays recorded upon the Journal of the House:  144 yeas, and 6 nays;  and among the yeas I read the name of William Kelley.

Mr. Kelley.  Mr. Speaker, as I had occasion to say to the gentleman in a former Congress, when he and the gentleman from New York [Mr. Hewitt] had chided me with inconsistency on the silver question, I have had to acquire knowledge by the usual process, not having been inspired on economic or other subjects, and knowing that I had slowly and with difficulty acquired knowledge I have never so cherished an opinion as not to be willing to abandon it when the logic of events, the teachings of the Almighty by the development of His providence, convinced me that I was in error.  I then admitted that I had been led into confusion on the question of the standard of payment.  We were not using gold or silver, and I had been fascinated by the idea of establishing, if possible, a single standard.

Mr. Atkins.  Mr. Speaker, I rise to a point of order.  I dislike very much to make the point on my venerable friend, the father of the House as he is sometimes styled;  but if the gentleman intends to enter into a political discussion I must raise the point of order.

Mr. Kelley.  I do not mean to enter into a political discussion.  I desire only to allude to what relates to me personally, and will carefully avoid a political discussion.  With permission, I will now say to the House that if the body of the gentleman's speech requires discussion at my hands, it shall have it hereafter and when such discussion will be in order.  What I propose to say now will refer to what relates to myself personally, and that I will condense as much as possible.

I voted in 1865 for the resolution produced by the gentleman and believed in it;  but its passage brought me many communications on the subject, some of which came from such teachers as the late Stephen Colwell and Mr. Henry C. Carey.  The vacation was at hand, and I devoted the leisure it gave me to the investigation of the question, and found that I had made a very grave mistake.  It was, the gentleman says, December 18, 1865, and having been convinced of the error into which I had fallen, I made an elaborate argument against the policy of contracting the currency on the 3d of the following January.  Then it was that I made the prediction with which I opened my remarks on the 15th of November, predicting that if the course proposed by Mr. McCulloch were pursued the disastrous condition of affairs now upon us would surely be precipitated.  I freely confess to an enlightenment by the great masters of economic science, and more than that, I as freely admit that, having discovered that I had been propagating error, I have devoted the interim, to the extent of my power and ability, to undo any evil I might have wrought.  So much for the contraction resolution.

In connection with the charge that I advocated the bill which demonetized the standard silver dollar, I say that, though the chairman of the Committee on Coinage, I was ignorant of the fact that it would demonetize the silver dollar or of its dropping the silver dollar from our system of coins, as were those distinguished Senators Messrs. Blaine and Voorhees, who were then members of the House, and each of whom, a few days since, interrogated the other: "Did you know it was dropped when the bill passed?" "No," said Mr. Blaine; "did you?" "No," said Mr. Voorhees. I do not think that there were three members in the House that knew it. I doubt whether Mr. Hooper, who, in my absence from the Committee on Coinage and attendance on the Committee on Ways and Means, managed the bill, knew it. I say this in justice to him.  I now ask the Clerk to read two paragraphs from the Globe of May 27, 1872, from which it will be seen that Mr. Hooper gave an assurance to the House that the bill made no change in our coinage.

The Clerk read as follows:

Mr. Holman.  Before the question is taken upon suspending the rules and passing the bill, I hope the gentleman from Massachusetts will explain the leading changes made by this bill in the existing law, especially in reference to the coinage.  It would seem that all the small coinage of the country is intended to be recoined.

Mr. Hooper, of Massachusetts.  This bill makes no changes in the existing law in that regard.  It does not require the recoinage of the small coins.  On the contrary, I understand that the Secretary of the Treasury proposes to issue an order to stop the coinage of all the minor coins, as there is now a great abundance of them in the country.  The salaries are not increased;  they remain as they were.

Mr. Kelley.  I now ask the Clerk to read the paragraph which I send up to him from the speech of the gentleman from Ohio, [Mr. Garfield].

The Clerk read as follows:

If I read the signs in the political horizon aright, the time is just at hand when men who love their country, its honor and its plighted faith, men of both political parties, will stand together against this now heresy known as American finance.  It was in the spirit of this same doctrine that the gentleman from Pennsylvania two years ago went to Ohio, to the borders of my district, to the leading town in the district of my colleague here, [Mr. McKinley,] and at a time of strikes in the center of that great iron region, when the question between capital and labor, between employers and employed, had been pushed to the verge of violence, and addressed an excited throng;  and, if the papers did not report him incorrectly, he warned the mill-owners, the capitalists, that the time was not far distant when labor might take capital by the throat.  We came near having scenes of riot awakened by the wild flash of his communistic torch.

He sought not only to destroy his party in Ohio, but to elect to our governorship a man who denounced gold and silver coin as a barren ideality.  The people of his district were not inclined to forget what he had done when the elections of last year were coming on;  and there are men now on this floor who courteously and tenderly, because of his years, ability, and long service, wrote to his people advising them to trust him again, and expressing the belief that the scenes of 1876 would not be repeated;  and on those assurances he is here to-day --here to-day to assail those who believe in redeeming the plighted promises of the nation.

Mr. Kelley.  I denounce that passage as the production of distempered imagination.  That I went to Youngstown and that I delivered an address there is true.  I went there upon the invitation of leading citizens of that town and of the Mahoning Valley, without distinction of party, to discuss a non-partisan question, the interconvertible-bond system.  There sat upon the stage from which I spoke the bankers and business men of the town and vicinity.  The proscenium boxes were filled with ladies, and the body of the hall with working and business men.  I saw no excited mob or crowd.  I made no communistic address.  I uttered no threat that labor would take capital by the throat.

When the address was over, my rooms were thronged with intelligent gentlemen who loitered with me until after midnight.  The next day being Sunday, I visited, with a prominent banker of the town, who was also largely engaged in the iron trade, a leading Presbyterian church, and, the service being over, I was kindly treated by a score and more of the gentlemen I encountered in the aisle and near the threshold of the edifice.  I dined with the gentleman referred to and his family.  We sat on the piazza of his handsome home on the main street, and received a succession of callers until about five o'clock, when I was driven to visit some of the more remote iron-fields of the neighborhood and the homes of their proprietors.

I heard nothing of communism or of danger of riot from any of these people.  I saw, and they, more familiar with the people, seemed to have seen no indications of the kind.  It was not until the papers came from Cleveland or Cincinnati that any apprehension could possibly have been raised in their minds.  Then there came in the organs of the contractionists what purported to be, and no doubt was, a special dispatch sent by somebody giving this extraordinary account of the occasion.  The whole scene as described by that dispatch was, as is the statement I am now about to treat and for which the gentleman is responsible, the creation of a distempered and ill-governed imagination.

The gentleman, continuing his remarks and referring to me, says:

He sought not only to destroy his party in Ohio, but to elect to our governorship a man who denounced gold and silver coin as a barren ideality.

My address was non-partisan.  Neither the democratic nor the republican party of Ohio was committed to or against the convertible-bond system, and I discussed it with its bearing on the currency question, and on the safety of savings-banks, then beginning to feel the peril into which they have now come.

The people of his district were not inclined to forget what he had done when the elections of last year were coming on;  and there are men now on this floor who courteously and tenderly, because of his years ---then numbering sixty-two--- ability, and long service, wrote to his people advising them to trust him again, and ---as I have read it elsewhere "appealing to them to trust him again;"  but I read it here in the Record--- advising them to trust him again, and expressing the belief that the scenes of 1876 would not be repeated;  and on those assurances he is here to-day --here to-day to assail those who believe in redeeming the plighted promises of the nation.

I wonder whether those appeals had not caused my election in 1860 and 1862 and for the eight times that my election had preceded the one then pending.  Now, sir, there sits upon this floor no man who ever to my knowledge wrote such a letter.  If there be one, I ask him to state it.  If he is under obligation of confidence to me I remit the obligation.  If he feels that the restraints which bind gentlemen in such matters restrain him, I appeal to him as a duty to me to state it.

Sir, one letter was written.  My friend Mr. Foster and I were then more intimate than now, by reason of the close proximity of our seats in this Hall and of our interest in Governor Hayes, upon whose prospects we frequently conferred, and I laid before him, as I did before my friend Danford, many letters received from constituents.

Efforts were being made in my district, as there had been at each of the eight preceding elections by which I had been returned, to nominate another man for Congress;  and some of my friends who wrote me seemed to be troubled by the fact that those who were seeking to defeat me, who were a small portion of my constituents, were stating that Governor Hayes desired my defeat as punishment for my having gone into Ohio, as was said, to electioneer for Mr. Allen.  With these communications came threats that if the candidate for the Presidency interposed to force a nomination on the fourth congressional district of Pennsylvania, some of the people would turn upon the republican candidate for Presidency.  In view of these facts it was arranged that my friend Foster, who represented the candidate for the Presidency, should write a letter that would answer a double purpose. [Loud and continued laughter.]  I pray you, Mr. Speaker, to bear in mind that, if dirty linen is to be washed here to-day, I did not introduce the bundle.

Mr. Chittenden.  Let the washing go on. [Laughter.]

Mr. Kelley.  Mr. Foster did address a letter to a gentleman whom I named, Mr. D.P. Southworth, a confidential friend of mine, saying that he had no authority to speak for him, but that he was the congressional representative of Governor Hayes, [laughter;] that he knew the kindly relations between the Governor and Mr. Kelley, and that he had reason to believe, and felt free to say, that Governor Hayes desired the return of Mr. Kelley. [Renewed laughter.]  That letter was given to me, and having from the time I heard that the gentleman from Ohio had made the assertion that I had requested an appeal in my behalf, challenged my memory, I can recall but one person to whom it was shown. That was Mr. Southworth, the gentleman to whom it was addressed, who read it and at my request handed it back to me.  So far I remember the facts in a general way.  I would be glad to yield to my friend from Ohio [Mr. Foster] if I have misstated them in any essential particular.  I have not attempted to give a verbatim report of the letter.

Now, sir, my relations with my constituents are peculiar.  They elected me to Congress in 1860, and at intervals of two years they have continued to return me.  They know my faults and foibles.  They know that I will sometimes roll the r, probably as an inheritance from my Irish ancestry rather than a vicious habit.  They know, too, that I have a will of my own, and that when suffering from dyspepsia I am sometimes rude.  They know also that I have difficulty in recognizing individuals and therefore often pass without notice persons to whom I ought to speak familiarly, and thus appear to be supercilious.  They are aware of all these and many graver faults, for I have lived among them now nearly sixty-four years.  I was a member in my young days of the volunteer fire department.  My name is still borne honorably (having been there since before I was sixteen years of age) on the roll of one of the military companies of Philadelphia.  I have prosecuted the pleas and defended criminals and conducted civil suits in her courts, and presided for nearly ten years (in company with three very able jurists who could supply my deficiencies) over the court which for the large city of Philadelphia had the technical jurisdiction of all the courts of Westminster, of the exchequer, and of the lord high chancellor;  which took charge of the apprentice boy who complained of his master;  which sentenced the convicted murderer who had been tried by its judges;  which reviewed the proceedings of magistrates and sat at nisi prius;  which settled the accounts of executors, administrators, and the trustees of such corporations as the late United States Bank;  which, after argument by counsel from several States of the Union, divorced such distinguished parties as the late Pierce Butler from his then wife, formerly Miss Fanny Kemble, as well as unhappy people of less note.

I say my constituents know me in the grain;  and the suggestion that they should have been influenced by the appeal of some loving friend of mine from Ohio --perhaps the gentleman himself-- for the ninth time to forgive my faults and send me here, will seem to a good many of them very preposterous;  and if they doubted the estimate of the gentleman's character implied by my recent speech, they will find confirmation of it in what he has said in this connection about them and their Representative.

Mr. Speaker, the word "trick" is a very offensive word;  and I probably have not sufficiently practiced its pronunciation as the gentleman seems to have taken offense at my way of pronouncing it, because I do not like the word.  But it is expressive, and we all have to use it sometimes.  I remember that when I first came into this House the then Speaker, Hon. Galusha Grow, when the subject of revising the reporters' notes of speeches for the Globe was under discussion, laid down the rule that there was a class of utterances which a member had no right to revise without the consent of another party, and that was innuendoes or direct assertions involving the character of a member.  I have heard Hon. Schuyler Colfax, during his long term in the office of Speaker, reaffirm that doctrine several times.  And if I had used broad, bold, and free language when assailing a gentleman in his absence from the House, I would have let it go into the Record, or expressing to him my regret for its use would have asked leave to make such modification as I would have put before him.  Had I in any such case tempered down my language so that he could not have it in full to reply to, and perhaps to move to expunge it, I would feel that I had been guilty of a "trick."

Mr. Foster.  Mr. Speaker---

The Speaker pro tempore.  Does the gentleman rise to a personal explanation ?

Mr. Foster.  Yes, sir.  Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Kelley] unquestionably has among his papers the letter to which he has referred.  I do not recollect precisely what it contained;  the general substance of it, I think, he has given correctly.  My only purpose in rising is to state a little more clearly the reasons that induced the writing of it.

The gentleman from Pennsylvania seemed annoyed at an effort that was being made in his district by certain parties against his renomination on the ground that he has gone to Ohio in 1875 and had stumped the State against Governor Hayes.  It was charged (as he represented to me) that it would be a discourteous act toward Governor Hayes, then the candidate of the republican party for the Presidency, to nominate my friend from Pennsylvania as republican candidate for Congress in his district in Philadelphia.

We had a good many talks about the matter, sitting as the gentleman says very near to each other, on opposite sides of the same aisle.  The conference extended probably to my friend General Garfield, and I know to my colleague, [Mr. Danford.]  Several suggestions were made, among them that I should go to Philadelphia, on my way to New York I believe, and should there be serenaded and should say in substance what was afterward incorporated in the letter. [Great laughter.]  But my laborious duties here on the Committee on Appropriations would not permit me to carry out that programme.  I would have been very glad 1o have stopped at the Continental Hotel and to have been serenaded by a band of music and to have been called out perhaps by the company to which the gentleman belonged in former times --a fire company I believe. [Laughter.]

I have always had, and have now, a very high regard for the gentleman from Pennsylvania.  He has always been my friend here, in my younger days was my friend, and I suspect he is my friend now.  I did not believe that Governor Hayes cared two cents whether my friend from Pennsylvania was nominated or not;  it was a matter of no great interest to him, [laughter;]  and I felt confident he would not feel himself treated unkindly if my friend from Pennsylvania were renominated.  For myself I desired to see him renominated;  I hope he may stay here for many years to come;  I hoped so then and I hope so now.  I wrote the letter referred to at his solicitation, and was very glad afterward to be informed by him that it had been of great service to him.

Mr. Kelley.  That it had been of service I plead guilty to having said.  As throwing a little light on the subject of who wanted me nominated and why it was desirable, it is known to some people here that when the campaign opened a republican candidate for Congress, a greenbacker, a convertible-bond man, who had been renominated and re-elected as such at the preceding election, would be a very convenient thing to have about the house in certain districts in Indiana, Ohio, and the interior of Pennsylvania, where the greenback heresy, as it was called, was prevailing, [laughter,] and at the request of the State committees of those three States, backed by letters from eminent personages who were not on these committees, I consented to go as the republican member favoring greenbacks and convertible bonds, who had been renominated by the republican party and had been re-elected by it, at the last election, to Indiana and Ohio and through the infected districts of Pennsylvania. [Laughter.]  In commenting upon the gentleman's assertion that I had excited riot, that I had taught communism in Youngstown, it is pertinent to remark that Youngstown was one of the places to which I was specially urged to go, and where it was arranged I should go so as to have a little loose time, and further to say that the gentleman now representing the Youngstown district has, within three weeks, told me that the leading men --I think of his district or of that county; it may be of Youngstown alone-- had appealed to him most urgently to get me to go to that town and address them on the tariff and kindred subjects.  I do not see my friend here, but I am quite sure he would confirm this statement if present.

Mr. McKinley.  As the gentleman from Pennsylvania refers to me, it is proper to say that some weeks ago I received a telegram from a number of prominent gentlemen of Youngstown, in my district, requesting me to invite the distinguished gentleman from Pennsylvania to address a tariff meeting to be held in that city and to urge him to attend and speak upon a subject in which they had so great interest.

Mr. Conger.  Was there a serenade promised ? [Laughter.]

Mr. Garfield (1831-1881).  I shall not take the time of the House many minutes in response.  If in any word I said the other day I did the slightest injustice to a gentleman who I know has long been in ill health, I should be most ready to acknowledge it and atone for it.  It would have been an outrageous wrong on my part to make his illness the occasion of any advantage to myself or any disparagement to him;  and if anybody here thought I did so, every such man is entitled to my humblest apology for so doing.  But if there was anything in the world I said which can be so construed I am utterly unconscious of it.  I have known of the gentleman's illness, and he has had my sympathy on account of it.

But it was only a little strange that long illness, which usually brings gentleness of spirit, should not have infused a little more of the spirit of gentleness in his more than two hours' personal attack on me.

As to the points which have been made I have only this thing to say:  If I have misrepresented any word or thought of his, I owe him an humble apology, and will make it any time and anywhere.  He is mistaken in supposing that my speech as printed in the Record of this morning is different from the speech as delivered in the House.  I added a few of the authorities to which I referred, and did so in accordance with my suggestion to the House that I would do so to save the time of reading them.  I have rarely made so few verbal corrections in any speech, and in no case have transcended the established usage of the House.  Those who heard me can judge.

I represented him, he says, as reporting the bill and declaring in the House for the demonetization of silver.  He now tells the House that he did not know the demonetization of the sliver dollar was in the bill.  How can that be possible ?  I read from his speech of 1872.  In reply to a question by Mr. Potter, of New York, he said:

It has become impossible to retain American silver in this country except in collections of curiosities. * * * All experience has shown that you must have one standard coin, which shall be a legal tender for all others, and then you may promote your domestic convenience by having a subsidiary coinage of silver.

This was said in direct answer to the question of the gentleman from New York [Mr. Potter] about the abandonment of the silver dollar.  He says that Mr. Holman drew out from Mr. Hooper an answer which indicated that Mr. Hooper did not understand the silver dollar was changed.

The question which Mr. Holman put was:  "Does it make any change in the coinage of the subsidiary coins" and Mr. Hooper answered "No, the subsidiary coinage goes on as before."  That is my understanding of the passage.

But no matter about that, the bill which the gentleman from Pennsylvania held in his hand and asked the House to pass dropped from the law the silver dollar.  His committee dropped it on the recommendation of the Secretary of the Treasury, which was in print and had long before been referred to his committee, and in the long report of Mr. Knox, Comptroller of the Currency, it was urged that the silver dollar should be dropped.  Upon those reports the bill was drawn which did drop it, and the gentleman holding it in his hand said the committee had gone over it, every line, and it ought to pass.  The democratic gentleman from Illinois [Mr. McNeely], not now here, rose and stated that he had gone over the bill thoroughly, line by line, and he was satisfied that it ought to pass.

I trust it will be clearly seen that I did not misrepresent him in this.

Now the gentleman reiterates constantly in his speech to-day, as he did in his speech of Tuesday last, that my facts are drawn from my inner consciousness, and he declares that the statement I made in regard to his speech in Youngstown, said to be of communistic tendency, was the fruit of my distempered imagination;  that that, too, came out of my inner consciousness.  Let us see.

When the gentleman made that denial, I sent to the Library and have now here the volume of the Daily Cincinnati Commercial for 1875.  When the volume arrived, it seemed that the distempered imagination of which he spoke changed from mine to that of another man.

Mr. Kelley. I see this volume now for the first time.

Mr. Garfield.  I send it to the desk and ask the Clerk to read from the issue of July 11, 1875, the passage I have marked, to see what a leading Ohio journal said and how they recorded the speech to which I referred.

The Clerk read as follows:

[Special telegram to the Commercial.]

Youngstown, Ohio, July 10, 1875.

The audience that assembled to hear Judge Kelley last night was by no means as large as was anticipated, for aside from his financial theory, his pig-iron record had made him regarded here as the peculiar champion of protection.  From eight hundred to one thousand, made up largely of workingmen from the mills, gathered in the Opera-House.  The judge spoke nearly two hours.  The abstract of his speech sent will give a tolerably fair idea of his remarks, with the exception of the peroration.  In this he entered upon a defense of the Ohio democracy against the sans culottes editorial in the New York Tribune of the 6th.  Nothing but a verbatim report would do the communistic violence of this justice.  After referring to the French revolution, in which he said the people, sans brecches, sans food, starving, naked, crushed to the earth, rose and through blood worked the regeneration of France, he exclaimed:  "I warn you, bankers and bullionists, that unless you desist from your plunder and robbing, a mob may be at your doors and a knife at your throats."  It is worth remarking that during this portion of the speech the pen of the stenographer Kelley brought with him was idle.  This defense of the democracy was besides a violation of the compact under which he came;  that he would speak for or against no party.  As I came from the meeting I met at the door of the Opera House one of the most prominent coal operators and iron manufacturers of the State, who has hitherto been understood to be a greenbacker, and asked him what he thought of it.  He exclaimed, excitedly:  "The man is crazy.  He is a rank communist."  If your reporter may be allowed to express an opinion he would say that had Fournier lived he would have rejoiced to see this day, though he might have been ashamed of so much stupidity in a disciple.

Mr. Garfield.  The leading citizens who heard his speech and the Cleveland papers in which it was reported, concur in the general accuracy of the report just read.  For ten years I represented Youngstown on this floor, and am familiar with its people and its history.  I submit whether the evidence I have offered did not warrant me in saying the other day that he went to Youngstown, assailed the party to which he belonged, and made a dangerous communistic speech, in which he attempted to array labor against capital and the employed against the employer, and bring us to the verge of serious trouble.  The suggestion that I drew all this from my inner consciousness, that it was the work of somebody's distempered imagination, either mine or that of the public press, is no reply.  I am sorry we have not the full report of the gentleman's short-hand reporter, that he might read us those disputed passages, but it appears from the Commercial that the gentleman's reporter was idle during that flaming peroration.

Now in regard to the other matter of the last falls campaign.  I know it was generally understood here that recommendations were solicited for the renomination of the gentleman.  I was consulted on the subject;  and if I had had the same faith that some of my associates had in the gentleman's restoration to his party I doubtless would have been glad to join in their effort.

Mr. Speaker, I again beg the pardon of the House for occupying its time in questions so personal as these.  I leave the whole case, hoping that I may not be considered as having drawn the materials of my late speech from my inner consciousness, but from stubborn facts.

Mr. Kelley.  I desire just one moment, if the House will indulge me.

The report you have just heard read descriptive of the size of the audience and the action of my clerk, the phonographer who accompanied me, and in these particulars contradicting what was given to the general press, was written by one who saw neither the audience, nor the speaker, nor the stenographer whose paralysis he described. [Laughter.]  He drew a graphic picture of the scene in strange contrast to that of the reporters who saw all these.  As to the phonographer I had with me, he is here on the floor and will certify, if necessary, that he did not use his pencil that evening, as there were plenty of others to do so, and that the reports they made were to go to the papers.

I made diligent search in the little time allowed me this morning --for, as the gentleman's speech did not appear the day after it was made, or yesterday, I did not know whether it would appear to-day-- for the Globe of February 17, 1872, but could not find it.  It has just been handed to me.  I have often been held up as the chairman of the committee which passed that bill and that engineered it.  I was nominally the chairman of the committee, but Mr. Hooper, of Massachusetts, had charge of the bill and I attended to my duties as a member of the Committee of Ways and Means.  I will ask the Clerk to read from the Globe referred to the paragraph I have marked, which will show the House that I had nothing to do with managing the bill that was passed and that it was then denied that it was the work of the committee.

The Clerk read as follows:

Mr. McNeely.  I have never seen a majority of the committee present, and I wish to find out something about this bill.  I hope as a member of the committee it will not be presented.

Mr. Kelley.  I beg leave to say, my duties as member of the Committee of Ways and Means have required me to be in attendance elsewhere.  I have not been able to give as much attention to the Committee on Coinage, Weights, and Measures as I should like, and therefore requested the gentleman from Massachusetts to act in my place as chairman of the committee.  I have never had the pleasure of meeting the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. McNeely] at any meeting of the committee when I was there.  This bill was under consideration at all the meetings of the committee which I attended, and I believe the report now made to have been the action of the committee.  I was about to ask that a day may be assigned for the consideration of the bill.

Mr. McNeely.  I have never myself seen at any meeting of the committee the gentleman who has just addressed the House.