In the special session beginning August 7, 1893, a Democratic Congress met under a Democratic President for the first time since 1859. The results were disappointing. Divided, leaderless, in large part at bitter variance with the Administration, the Democrats trooped to their overthrow two years later. During his second Administration Mr. Cleveland considerably extended the merit system in the civil service. Candidates for consulships were subjected to (non-competitive) examination. Public opinion commended these moves, as it did the President's prompt signing of the Anti-Lottery Bill, introduced in Congress when it was learned that the expatriated Louisiana Lottery from its seat under Honduras jurisdiction was operating in the United States through the express companies. The bill prohibiting this abuse was passed at three in the morning on the last day of the Congressional session, and received the President's signature barely five minutes before the Congress expired. [Illustration: Cleveland seated at a cluttered desk.] Grover Cleveland. From a photograph by Alexander Black. At the opening of the Special Session, in August, 1893, the President demanded the repeal of that clause in the Sherman law of 1890 requiring the Government to make heavy monthly purchases of silver. The suspension in India of the free coinage of silver the preceding June had precipitated a disastrous monetary panic in the United States. Gold was hoarded and exported, vast sums being drained from the Treasury. Credits were refused, values shrivelled, business was palsied, labor idle. It was this situation which led the President to convoke Congress in special session. Though achieving the repeal on November 1st, after Congressional wrangles especially long and bitter in the Senate, President Cleveland, pursuing the policy of paying gold for all greenbacks presented at the Treasury, was unable, even by the sale of $50,000,000 in bonds, to keep the Treasury gold reserve up to the $100,000,000 figure. Both old greenbacks and Sherman law greenbacks, being redeemed in gold, reissued and again redeemed, were used by exchangers like an endless chain pump to pump the Treasury dry. In February, 1895, the reserve stood at the low figure of $41,340,181. None knew when the country might be forced to a silver basis. In consequence, business revived but slightly, if at all, after the repeal.