Thus the United States Treasury would become the convenient and capacious conduit through which silver should immediately flow from this country to England, depriving our people, notwithstanding the legislative measures for their relief, of practically all use of silver as money, inasmuch as the four and a half-million dollars of Treasury notes would be withdrawn and canceled about as soon as issued. Thus would our Treasury Department be made practically the purchasing agent in this country of any syndicate or combination of English merchants who might desire silver for the East India trade. If it be said that no Secretary of the Treasury would attempt thus to defeat the will of the people as expressed in the law, the sufficient reply is that a conscientious man who believes that the honor of the United States is pledged to the maintenance of the gold standard, and that it is indispensable to the prosperity of the people, will exercise all the power vested in him by law to prevent a departure from that standard, and will regard himself as for the time being the savior of the Republic by keeping it from "the edge of so dangerous a peril" as the execution of the people's will. Certainly no man will deny to the present Secretary of the Treasury entire rectitude of motive in all his conduct. From the well-known fact that since the passage of the limited coinage act of 1878 all our Secretaries have refrained from purchasing more silver than they were compelled to do by the mandatory provision of that law, it is reasonable to infer that none of them, if called upon to execute a law containing a silver bullion redemption clause, such as is suggested, would feel called upon to make a net purchase of more than $2,000,000 worth in each month; and that none of them would hesitate to exchange for Treasury notes all the monthly purchases of bullion in excess of that amount. A PLANK FROM THE REPUBLICAN PLATFORM. I must be pardoned for directing the attention of Senators on this side of the Chamber to a short declaration of the last Republican National Convention: The Republican party is in favor of the use of both gold and silver as money. If party platforms mean anything that clause meant that the Republican party went before the country pledged to the use and to the equal and non-discriminating use of both silver and gold as money. It was well known that throughout the entire West the question of the remonetization of silver was deemed of vital importance, and party orators and the party press, throughout that entire section were severe in their denunciation of the prior administration of its unfriendly attitude toward silver.