"To appreciate the genius and achievements of Rober! Burns, it is fitting to compare him with others who have been eminent in the same field. In the highest class of lyric poetry their names stand eminent. Their field covers eighteen centuries of time, and the three names are Horace, Beranger and Burns. It is an interesting and suggestive fact, that each of these sprang from the humble walks of life. Each may be described as one "Who begs a brother of the earth and each proved by his life and achievements that, however hard the lot of poverty, 'a man's a man for a' that.' "A great writer has said that it took the age forty years to catch Burns, so far was he in advance of the thoughts of his times. But we ought not to be surprised at the power he exhibited. We are apt to be misled when we seek to find the cause of greatness in the schools and universities alone. There is no necessary conflict between nature and art. In the highest and best sense art is as natural as nature. We do not wonder at the perfect beauty of the rose, although we may not understand the mysteries by which its delicate petals are fashioned and fed out of the grosser elements of earth. We do not wonder at the perfection of the rose because God is the artist. When He fashioned the germ of the rose-tree He made possible the beauties of its flower. The earth and air and sunshine conspired to unfold and adorn it-to tint and crown it with peerless beauty. When the Divine Artist would produce a poem, He plants a germ of it in a human soul, and out of that soul the poem springs and grows as from the rosetree the rose. "Burns was a child of nature. He lived close to her beating heart, and all the rich and deep sympathies of life glowed and lived in his heart. The beauties of earth, air and sky filled and transfigured him. "He did but sing because he must, And piped but as the linnets sing.' "With the light of his genius he glorified 'the banks and braes' of his native land, and, speaking for the universal human heart, has set its sweetest thought to music: Here we will add a metrical version of the third nde in Horace's First Book, which General Garfield made in 1873: TO THE SHIP WHICH CARRIED VIRGIL TO ATHENS. What form, or what pathway of death him affrighted, Who gazed without fear on the storm-swollen billows, And the lightning-scarred rocks, grim with death on the shore? C CHAPTER XXI. QUESTIONS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. ONTEMPORANEOUSLY with his entry into Congress, Garfield began a course of severe study of financial and political economy, going home every evening to his modest lodgings on Thirteenth Street, with an armful of books borrowed from the Congressional Library, into which he deeply burrowed. This study was superbly lucrative. For his financial views have always been sound and based on the firm foundation of honest money and unsullied national honor. His record in the legislation concerning these subjects is without a flaw. No man in Congress made a more consistent and unwavering fight against the paper money delusions that flourished during the decade following the war, and in favor of specie payments and the strict fulfillment of the nation's obligations to its creditors. His speeches became the financial gospel of the Republican party. We will quote some texts from this gospel. In the course of his strenuous fight against the repeal of the resumption act, Mr. Garfield said: "The men of 1862 knew the dangers from sad experience in our history; and, like Ulysses, lashed themselves to the mast of public credit when they embarked upon the stormy and boisterous sea of inflated paper money, that they might not be beguiled by the siren song that would be sung to them when they were afloat on the wild waves. "But the times have changed; new men are on deck, men who have forgotten the old pledges, and now only twelve years have passed (for as late as 1865 this House, with but six dissenting votes, resolved again to stand by the old ways and bring the country back to sound money), only twelve years have passed, and what do we find? We find a group of theorists and doctrinaires who look upon the wisdom of the fathers as foolishness. We find some who advocate what they call absolute money,' who declare that a piece of paper stamped a 'dollar' is a dollar; that gold and silver are a part of the barbarism of the past, which ought to be forever abandoned. We hear them declaring that resumption is a delusion and a snare. We hear them declaring that the eras of prosperity are the eras of paper money. They point us to all times of inflation as periods of blessing to the people and prosperity to business; and they ask us no more to vex their ears with any allusion to the old standard-the money of the Constitution. Let the wild swarm of financial literature that has sprung into life within the last twelve years, witness how widely and how far we have drifted. We have lost our old moorings, and have thrown overboard our old compass; we sail by alien stars, looking not for the haven, but are afloat on a harborless sea. "Suppose you undo the work that Congress has attempted -to resume specie payment-what will result? You will de preciate the value of the greenback. Suppose it falls ten cents on the dollar? You will have destroyed ten per cent. of the value of every deposit in the savings banks, ten per cent. of every life insurance policy and fire insurance policy, of every pension to the soldier, and of every day's wages of every laborer in the nation. The trouble with our greenback dollar is this: it has two distinct functions, one a purchasing power, and the other a debt-paying power. As a debt-paying power, it is equal to one hundred cents; that is, to pay an old debt. A greenback dollar will, by law, discharge our hundred cents of debt. But no law can give it purchasing power in the general market of the world, unless it represents a known standard of coin value. Now, what we want is, that these two qualities of our greenback dollar shall be made equal-its debt-paying power and its general purchasing power. When these are equal, the problems of our currency are solved, and not till then. Summing it all up in a word, the struggle now pending in this House is, on the one hand, to make the greenback better, and on the other, to make it worse. The resumption act is making it better every day. Repeal that act, and you make it indefinitely worse. In the name of every man who wants his own when he has earned it, I demand that we do not make the wages of the poor man to shrivel in his hands after he has earned them; but that his money shall be made better and better, until the plow-holder's money shall be as good as the bondholder's money; until our standard is one, and there is no longer one money for the rich and another for the poor." Privately he wrote to Mr. Hinsdale: "WASHINGTON, D. C., December 15th, 1867. 'I appreciate what you say in reference to the currency question. My convictions on some points of that subject are so clear that I have a very plain duty to do, from which I dare not flinch, were I coward enough to desire to. "The Phillipses are quite mistaken in supposing that theirs is a case without precedent. On the contrary, there are an abundance of precedents, both in our own and other countries, and they all teach the same lesson. Financial subjects are nuts and clover for demagogues. Men's first opinions are almost always wrong in regard to them, as they are in regard to astronomy, and he who reads the truths that lie deepest is in imminent danger of being tabooed for a madman. 66 * * It may be that before very long that the only escape out of the Butler-Pendleton bond repudiation scheme on the one hand, and the contraction and inflation fight on the other, is by the shortest road to specie payments, when the contractionists will be willing to let the inflationists have their fill of paper money so long as they redeem it, and when the cry that the soldier or his widow is paid in poorer money than the bondholder |