The annual rent now paid for the postoffice is thirteen hundred dollars. The interest, at three per cent., upon the amount now asked for this new building is three thousand dollars. As soon as it is undertaken, the pay of a superintendent of its construction will begin, and after its completion the compensation of janitors and other expenses of its maintenance will follow.

The plan now pursued for the erection of public buildings is in my opinion very objec tionable. They are often built where they are not needed, of dimensions and at a cost entirely disproportionate to any public use to which they can be applied, and, as a consequence, they frequently serve more to demonstrate the activity and pertinency of those who represent localities desiring this kind of decoration at public expense, than to meet any necessity of the Government.

EXTRAVAGANT DEMANDS FOR PUBLIC BUILDINGS.

In another he lets in some light on the great demands made upon the country by the bills pending in Congress, saying:

The fact was communicated to me, early in the present session of the Congress, that the aggregate sum of the appropriations contained in bills for the erection and extension of public buildings, which had up to that time been referred to the House Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds, was about thirty-seven millions of dollars.

Of course this fact would have no particular relevancy if all the buildings asked for were necessary for the transaction of public business, as long as we have the money to pay for them. But inasmuch as a large number of the buildings proposed are unnecessary and their erection would be wasteful and extravagant, beside furnishing precedents for further and more extended reckless expenditures of a like character, it seems to me that applications for new and expensive public buildings should be carefully scrutinized.

He enforces this same idea again in another message:

Not a little legislation has lately been perfected and very likely more will be necessary to increase miscalculated appropriations for, and correct blunders in, the construction of many of the public buildings now in process of erection.

While this does not furnish a good reason for disapproving the erection of other buildings where actually necessary, it induces close scrutiny, and gives rise to the earnest wish that new projects for public buildings shall for the present be limited to such as are required by the most pressing necessities of the Government's business.

THE DISTRIBUTIVE IDEA CONSIDERED.

The locality idea, the argument that one section must have a postoffice building because it has not had its share, is thus presented in another message:

It is further stated in a communication from the promoter of this bill that "there is not a Federal public building in the State of Ohio east of the line drawn on the accompanying map from Cleveland through Columbus to Cincinnati; and when wealth and population and the needs of the public service are considered, the distribution of public buildings in the State is an unfair one."

Here is disclosed a theory of expenditure for public buildings which I can hardly think should be adopted. If an application for the erection of such a building is to be determined by the distance between its proposed location and another public building, or upon the allegation that a certain division of a State is without a Governmont building, or that the distribution of these buildings in a particular State is unfair, we shall rapidly be led to an entire disregard of the considerations of necessity and public need which it seems to me should alone justify the expenditure of public funds for such a purpose.

The care and protection which the Government owes to the people do not embrace the grant of public buildings to decorate thriving and prosperous cities and villages, nor should such buildings be erected upon any principle of fair distributions among localities. The Government is not an almoner of gifts among the people, but an instrumentality by which the people's affairs should be conducted upon business principles, regulated by the public needs.

QUESTIONING THE LATEST DIRECTORY STATISTICS.

He does not always accept the hopeful estimates of the promoters of such schemes as to the population of a given town, but subjects them to an analysis which is somewhat damaging, as the following will show:

The report of the committee of the House of Representatives to whom this bill was referred, states that by the census of 1880 the population of Sioux City was nearly eight thousand, and that by other enumerations since made its population would seem to exceed twenty-three thousand. It is further stated in the report that for the accommodation of this population the city contains three hundred and ninety-three brick and two thousand nine hundred and eighty-four frame buildings.

It seems to me that in the consideration of the merits of this bill the necessities of the Government should control the question, and that it should be decided as a business proposition depending upon the needs of a Government building at the point proposed in order to do the Government work.

This greatly reduces the value of statistics showing population, extent of business, prospective growth, and matters of that kind, which though exceedingly interesting, do not always demonstrate the necessity of the expenditure of a large sum of money for a public building.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

MR. THURMAN'S PUBLIC RECORD.

VIEWS OF THE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE FOR VICE-PRESIDENT ON QUESTIONS OF IMPORTANCE.

A Progressive Democrat-Grounded in the Faith-The Services of a Ripe Jurist and Fearless

Public Servant.

I.

Allen G. Thurman, the Democratic candidate for Vice-President, is no political tyro, no untried publicist, no statesman of a day sprung into notoriety by the accident of a passing occasion. For thirty years he has been the acknowledged leader of his party in the third State of the Union; and during twelve years of service in the Senate he was by common consent accorded a chief place among the few men of acknowledged first rank in that body, by reason of his learning as a lawyer, his wisdom and patriotism as a statesman, his power as a debater and his purity as a man.

He was first chosen to Congress in 1844, and took his seat when Clay, Calhoun, Webster, Benton and other Senatorial giants were in the maturity of their powers. The tariff of 1846, the Mexican war and the Oregon question were some of the subjects of disputation during his single Congressional term. He served on the Judiciary Committee in the House, of which body Dr. John W. Davis, of Indiana, was Speaker.

He supported the administration and its conduct of the Mexican war. He made a speech on the Oregon issue, and stood firm with Stephen A. Douglas, Andrew Johnson and Howell Cobb against the abandonment by most of his Democratic colleagues of the bold position they had before taken for "Fifty-four Forty or Fight."

In the division of the Northern Democrats over the "Wilmot Proviso" he voted with Hannibal Hamlin, Preston King, Simon Cameron, and John Wentworth, of his party, in favor of that momentous amendment to the proposed executive grant.

In the Douglas-Buchanan party differences he opposed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and advocated non-interference of the Federal Government for slavery in the Territories. He was against the Lecompton Constitution for Kansas, and supported Douglas for President in 1860, though never accepting his doctrine of "squatter sovereignty." He strenuously antagonized the doctrine of secession and loyally supported the Union cause. He believed in the vigorous prosecution of the war, though he never justified the resort to unconstitutional means nor recognized the necessity of imperiling the Union to save it. He had but two logic: I alternatives as to the relation of the seceded States to the general Government: If they were out of the Union the North was at war with them and every loyal man must stand by the flag; if they were in the Union, they were in a state of insurrection that must be suppressed.

VIEWS ON THE TARIFF.

From a speech which he made in one of the Ohio campaigns about the time of his election to the United States Senate, an extract on the tariff issue will show how clearly he foreshadowed the issue of the campaign in which he has come to be one of the standard bearers in 1888.

On September 7th, 1868, he said:

What is the

"I desire to call your attention, first, to the subject of the tariff. tariff? It is a duty or tax levied by the Government upon goods imported into the United States. When no higher than was required for the purposes of revenue, it has always been cheerfully acquiesced in by the people. They have generally preferred it to any other mode of taxation, and they have not objected to so arranging a revenue tariff as to afford incidental protection or benefit to our own manufactu rers. But when a tariff, like that now in force, is framed, not for revenue purposes, but to give one class of capitalists a monopoly of the market, or at least to enhance the price of everything they make and thus burden the consumers, it becomes seriously oppressive. It is a tax that benefits no one but the favored capitalist. It does not benefit the Government, for a greater revenue would be produced by a lower tax. When a tariff is exorbitant, importations fall off, the revenue fails, and the Government loses.

But the favored monopolist, having the market substantially to himself, adds. to the price of his commodities, and the consumers suffer. Whether they buy imported or domestic goods, in the price they pay for them they pay the tax levied by the Government. If the goods be imported, the importer pays the tax and adds it, with a per cent. of interest or profit, to the price when he sells to the retail merchant, and the latter adds to that his per cent. of interest or profit when he sells to the consumer, who is the man that in the end pays the tax, and the profits or interest thereon. If the goods be not imported, yet the domestic manufacturer raises the price of his goods to that of the importations, and so the consumer pays the amount of the tax, while the Government gets not one cent of it. Now, that is precisely what is going on every day. There is not an article you wear, the price of which is not enhanced by the enormous tariff duties levied by our Government."

II.

ON STATE RIGHTS AND FEDERAL POWERS.

In a speech in the Senate, January 23, 1872, Mr. Thurman gave very lucid exposition of the modern Democratic idea of the Constitutional relation of State Rights to Federal powers, when he said:

Mr. President, I once more say that, although I have never gone to any such length as some State-rights men have gone in deducing the doctrine of the right of secession, and have never believed and do not believe in that doctrine, yet I am, and

hope I shall die, a State rights man. I am so because I believe that the existence of the States and the existence of local self-government are essential to freedom and to prosperity in this country.

If there is no such thing as State rights, how comes it that the two distinguished Senators from Vermont are here, coming from a State with not one-tenth, not onetwelfth, very little more than one-thirteenth, of the population of the State of New York? How comes it that with three hundred thousand inhabitants only, there are two Senators on this floor from Vermont, while New York, with more than four millions, has but two? How comes that, sir, if there be no such thing as State rights? What right have they to make local law for Ohio? Why should New York, with her four millions of people and only two Senators on this floor, have her local law made here by the votes of twelve Senators from New England, when all New England has not a population equal to hers? How is it that twelve votes shall be received here from New England to make local law for Missouri? In that local law New England has no interest whatsoever, while that great State, soon to have a population equal to that of all of New England, and now with a population half as great, has but two Senators on this floor? What is it that gives this unequal representation in the Senate but the doctrine of State rights; nay, sir, to go further, but the doctrine of the original sovereignty of the States?

I am not complaining of this. I am willing to stand by this inequality in the Senate of the United States so long as you stand by the constitution as its framers intended it to be. So long as you do not trample State governments out of existence, so long as you let local legislation be the subject of local State law alone, so long as you do not interfere and usurp the powers that properly belong to the States, I greet with arms wide open the Senators from the smallest Štate of this Union; nay, I will take the Senators from Nevada into my embrace, although their whole State does not contain as many people as the little city in which I live; I will take them and welcome them here so long as you leave to the State governments that power which the framers of the Constitution intended they should have, and which, in my judgment, is essential to the very existence of free institutions at all. But if you will strike down that power, if you will abolish local legislation, if you will annihilate the States, if you will make them mere departments of a centralized Government, if you will make them the mere counties of a great State, then I say to Senators the time will come when that inequality in the Senate will not be submitted to longer. I do not want to see that time. I want to see no such question raised. I want to see the Constitution administered in the spirit in which it was framed. I want the General Government sufficiently strong to protect us against all foreign aggression. I want it to be sufficiently strong to protect us in the enjoyment of peace in this country so far as that function is devolved upon it by the Constitution. I want to believe that with all its blessings, it will endure for all time to come, if anything of earthly institution can so long endure. But I do firmly believe that it is precisely the institution of State governments, it is precisely the allotment of local legislation to a local power, which enables this Republic to spread itself from ocean to ocean, and from the arctic zone down to the torrid. Strike that out of it, strike its local self-government out of the system, and it will go the way that all consolidated, centralized governments have gone in all time past; first a despotism unendurable, and next a rending into fragments more numerous far than the States of this union now are.

III.

OBJECTIONS TO CENTRALIZATION.

In a previous campaign speech he had thus forcibly set forth the dangers of the centralizing tendencies which were at this period controlling the legislation of the country:

I am opposed to the centralization of all powers in the Federal Government, for reasons that can be but briefly and imperfectly stated in the proper limits of a speech.