Mr. Daniel's Speech.

Mr. Chairman of the National Democratic Committee: In receiving from your hands this gavel as the temporary presiding officer of this convention, I beg leave to express a sentiment, which I am sure is unanimous, that no national convention was ever presided over with more ability or with more fairness than by yourself. I can express no better wish for myself than that I may be able in some feeble fashion to model my conduct by your model and to practice by your example.

Gentlemen: The high position to which you have chosen me is accepted with profound gratitude for the honor which it confers and with a keen sense of the responsibility which it entails upon me.

That responsibility I would be wholly inadequate to bear did I depend upon myself, but your gracious and sympathetic aid can make its yoke easy and its burden light. That aid I confidently invoke for the sake of the great cause under whose banner we have fought so many battles and which now demands our stanch devotion and loyal service.

I regret that my name should have been brought in even the most courteous competition with that of my distinguished friend the great Senator from New York, but he will readily recognize the fact as I do, that there is no personality in the preferment given me. He must know as we all do that it is solely due to the principle that this great majority of Democrats stands for and that I stand for with them; and that it is given, too, in the spirit of the instructions received by these representatives of the people from the people whom all Democrats bow to as the original and purest fountain of all power.

The birth of the Democratic party was coeval with the birth of the sovereignty of the people. It can never die until the Declaration of American Independence is forgotten, and that sovereignty is dethroned and extinguished.

As the majority of the convention is not personal in its aims, neither is it sectional. It begins with the sunrise in Maine and spreads into a sunburst in Louisiana and Texas. It stretches in unbroken line across the continent from Virginia and Georgia to California. It sends forth its pioneers from Plymouth Rock and waves the palmetto in South Carolina. It has its strongholds in Alabama and Mississippi and its outposts in Delaware and Minnesota, Florida and Oregon. It sticks like a tar heel in the old north State and writes 16 to 1 on the saddle bags of the Arkansas Traveler. It pours down its rivulets from the mountains of New Hampshire and West Virginia and makes a great lake in New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming and Idaho, Montana and Colorado. It stands guard around the National Capitol in the District of Columbia and taps at the door in far off Washington. It sweeps like a prairie fire over Iowa and Kansas and lights up the horizon in Nebraska. It marshals its massive battalions in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri.

Last but not least, when I see this grand array and think of the British gold standard that recently was unfurled over the ruins of Republican promises at St. Louis, I think, too, of the battle of New Orleans of which 'tis said

There stood John Bull in martial pomp,

But there was old Kentucky.

Brethren of the East there is no North, South, East or West in this uprising of the people for American emancipation from the conspiracy of European

kings led by Great Britain, which seeks to destroy one half of the money of the world, and to make American manufacturers, merchants, farmers and mechanics hewers of wood and drawers of water.

But there is one thing golden that let me commend to you. It is the golden rule to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Remember the creed of Jefferson that absolute acquiescence in the will of the majority is the vital principle of the Republic, and Democrats as you have been, Democrats that you should be, acquiesce now in the will of this great majority of your fellow Democrats who only ask you to go with them as they have often gone with you.

Do not forget that for thirty years we have supported the men that you named for President-Seymour, Greeley, Tilden, Hancock and Cleveland. Do not forget that we have submitted graciously to your compromise platforms and to your repeated pledges for bimetallism and have patiently borne repeated disappointments as to their fulfillment.

Do not forget that even in the last national convention of 1892 you proclaimed yourselves to be in favor of the use of both gold and silver as the standard money of the country and for the coinage of both gold and silver without discrimination against either metal or charge for mintage, and that the only question left open was the ratio between the metals.

Do not forget that just four years ago in that same convention the New York delegation stood here solid and immovable for a candidate committed to the free and unlimited coinage of silver and gold at the ratio of 16 to 1; and that if we are for it still it is in some measure from your teachings.

That we owe you much is readily acknowledged and gratefully acknowledged, but are not our debts mutual and not one sided as to each other?

The Force bill, the McKinley bill and the Sherman law were the triplet progeny of the Republican party. The first was aimed not more at the South than at the great cities of the East, and chief among them at the great Democratic city of New York with its munificent patronage. It got its death blow in the Senate where there was not a single Democratic vote from New York and all New England. If you helped to save the South it also helped to save you, and neither the East nor the South could have saved itself had not those great American Republican Senators from the West, Teller and Wolcott, Stewart, Jones and Stanford, sunk partisanry in patriotism and come to the rescue of American institutions. No man can revive Force bills now in this glorious reconciled and reunited Republic. Our opponents themselves have abandoned them; there is none that can stand between the union of hearts and hands that Grant in his dying vision saw was coming on angels' wings to all the sons of our common country.

When Chicago dressed with flowers the Southern graves she buried sectionalism under a mountain of fragrance; and when the Southern soldiers cheered but yesterday the wounded hero of the North in Richmond, she answered back, let us have peace-peace and union and liberty forever.

As this majority of Democrats is not sectional neither is it for any privilege of class or for class legislation. The active business men of this country, its manufacturers, its merchants, its farmers, its sons of toil in counting room, factory, field and mine, know that a contraction of the currency sweeps away

with the silent and relentless force of gravitation the annual profits of their enterprise and investment, and they know too that the gold standard means contraction and the organization of disaster.

What hope is there for the country, what hope for Democracy unless the views of the majority here be adopted?

Do not the people know that it was not silver legislation but the legislation dictated by the advocates of the gold standard that has caused and now continues the financial depression? Do they not know that when their demands upon Democracy were complied with in 1893 and the Sherman law repealed without a substitute, that the very States of the East that demanded it turned against the Democrats who granted it and swept away their majorities in a torrent of ballots. Had the silver men had their way instead of the gold monometallists, what storms of abuse would now burst here upon their heads!

But the people are now applying the power of memory and analysis to discover the causes of their arrested prosperity and they need not go far to find them.

They do not forget that when Democracy came to power in 1893 it inherited from its Republican predecessors a tax system and a currency system of which the McKinley law and the Sherman law were the culminating atrocities. It came amidst the panic which quickly followed their enactment-amongst decreased wages, strikes, lock-outs, riots and civic commotions, while the scenes of peaceful industry in Pennsylvania had been turned into military camps. Besides manifold oppressive features the McKinley law had thrown away $50,000,000 of revenue tax derived from sugar under the spectral plea of a free breakfast table, and had substituted bounties to sugar planters, thus decreasing revenue and increasing expenditure, and making the people pay at past for the alleged free breakfast. From the joint operations of the McKinley law and Sherman law an adverse balance of trade had been forced against us in 1893a surplus of $100,000,000 in the Treasury had been converted into a deficit of seventy million in 1894 before yet a Democratic statute had come into operation, and engraved bonds prepared by a Republican Secretary to borrow money to support the Government were the ill omens of the pre-organized ruin which awaited incoming Democracy at a depleted Treasury.

More significant still, the very authors of the ill starred and ill concocted Sherman makeshift were already at confessional and upon the stool of penetance, and were begging help from Democrats to put out the conflagration of disaster which they themselves had incited.

So far as revenue to support the Government is concerned, the Democratic party, with but a slender majority in the Senate, was not long in providing it, and had not the Supreme Court of the United States reversed its settled doctrines of a hundred years the income tax, incorporated in their tariff bill, would long since have supplied the deficit.

Respecting finance, the Republican, Populist and Democratic parties, while differing upon other subjects, had alike declared for the restoration of our American system of bimetallism.

By Republican and Democratic votes alike the Sherman law was swept from the statute books, the eagerness to rid the country of that Republican incubus being so great that no pause was made to provide its substitute. But

in the very act of its repeal it was solemnly declared to be the policy of the United States to continue the use of both gold and silver as standard money and to coin them into dollars of equal intrinsic and exchangeable value.

The Republican party has now renounced the creed of its platforms and of our statutes. It has presented to the country the issue of higher taxes, more bonds and less money.

We can only expect, should they succeed, new spasms of panic and a long protracted period of depression. Do not ask us then to join them on any of these propositions. Least of all, ask us not to join them upon the money question to fight a sham battle over the settled tariff, for the money question is the one paramount issue before the people, and it involves true Americanism more than any economic issue ever presented to the people at a presidential election. Existing gold standard? Whence come the idea that we are upon it. Not from the Democratic platform of 1892, which promised to hold us to the double enc. Not from the last enactment of Congress on the subject in repealing the Sherman law, which pledges us to the continuance of the double one. Not from any statute of the United States in force. No, we are not upon any gold standard, but we have a disordered and miscellaneous currency, of nine varieties, three of metal and six of paper, the product for the most part of Republican legislation, rendered worse by treasury practices begun by Republican secretaries and unfortunately copied by the Democratic administration.

And consider these facts. The Federal, State and municipal taxes are assessed and paid by the standard of the whole mass of money in circulation. No authority has ever been conferred by Congress for the issue of bonds payable in gold, but distinctly refused. The specie resumption act of 1875 made the surplus revenue in the Treasury, not gold only, the redemption fund. Before the period for the operation of that act arrived, provision was made by the BlandAllison act which has added to our circulation some three hundred and fifty millions of standard silver money or paper based upon it, and they are sustained at parity with gold by nothing on earth but the metal in them and their legal tender functions. We have no outstanding obligations payable in gold except the small sum of forty-four million of gold certificates, which, of course, should be so paid. All of our special obligations are payable in coin, which means silver or gold at government option, or in silver only. There is more silver or paper based upon it in circulation than there is in gold or paper based on gold. And that gold dollars are not the sole units of value is demonstrated by the fact that no gold dollar pieces whatever are now minted.

If we should go upon the gold standard it is evident that we must change the existing bimetallic standard of payment of all public debts, taxes and appropriations, save those specifically payable in gold only. As we have twenty billions of public and private debt, it would take more than three times all the gold in the country to pay one year's interest in that medium.

We should be compelled hereafter to contract the currency by paying the five hundred millions of greenbacks and Sherman notes in gold, which would nearly exhaust the entire American stock in and out of the Treasury, and the same policy would require that the three hundred and forty-four millions of silver certificates should be paid in gold as foreshadowed by the present Director of the Mint in his recommendation.

This means the increase of the public debt by five hundred millions of interest bearing gold bonds with the prospect of three hundred and forty-four millions to follow.

The disastrous consequences of such a policy are appalling to contemplate, and the only alternative suggested is the free coinage of silver as well as gold and the complete restoration of our American system of bimetallism.

Bring us, we pray you, no more makeshifts and straddlers. Vex the country with no more prophecies of smooth things to come from the BritishRepublican gold propaganda.

The fact that European nations are going to the gold standard renders it all the more impracticable for us to do so, for the limited stock of gold would have longer division and a smaller share for each nation.

Remember how previous predictions made when the unconditional repeal of the Sherman law cut off silver have been refuted.

Instead of protecting the Treasury reserve as was proclaimed it would do, an unprecedented raid was promptly made upon it, and two hundred and sixty-two millions of borrowed gold have been insufficient to guarantee its security.

Instead of causing foreign capital to flow to us, it has stimulated the flow of gold to Europe and the greenback notes and the Sherman notes, which are just as much payable in silver as in gold, have been used to dip the gold out of the Treasury and pour it into the strong boxes of the war lords of Europe.

Instead of reviving business, this policy has further depressed it. Instead of increasing wages this policy has further decreased them. Instead of multiplying opportunities for employment, this policy has multiplied idlers who cannot get it. Instead of increasing the prices of our produce, this policy has lowered them as is estimated about fifteen per cent. in three years. Instead of restoring confidence, this policy has banished confidence. Instead of bringing relief, it has brought years of misery, and for obvious reasons. It has contracted the currency four dollars a head for every man, woman and child in the United States since November 1, 1893. And with this vast aggregate contraction the prices of land and manufactured goods and of all kinds of agricultural and mechanical produce have fallen, the public revenues have fallen, the wages of labor have fallen, and everything has fallen but taxes and debts, which have grown in burden, while on the other hand the means of payment have diminished in value. Meantime, commercial failures have progressed. The dividends of banks have shrunken.

Three-fourths of our railway mileage have gone into the hands of the receivers and the country has received a shock from which it will take many years to recover. In this condition the new-fledged monometallists ask us to declare for a gold standard, and wait for relief upon some ghostly dream of international agreement.

But the people well know how the conspiracy of European monarchs, led by Great Britain, has purposes of aggrandizement to subserve in the war upon American silver money, and stand in the way of such agreement. They are creditor nations, and seek to enhance the purchasing power of the thousands