After the panic of 1873 had resulted in such a depression of business and depreciation of values throughout the country as to create greater discontent with the existing political management, and this discontent had manifested itself so distinctly in the elections of 1874, announcing to the Republican party that after March 5th, 1875, a Democratic majority would prevail in the House of Representatives, it was manifest to the Republican leaders, in Congress and out of Congress, that if anything was to be done in regard to the resumption of specie payment, anything for bringing the paper currency of the United States up to a coin value, it must be done speedily, and on the 21st of December, 1874, Mr. Sherman reported a bill from the Finance Committee to the Senate for this purpose, which became a law on the 14th day of January following, and which provided for the redemption of the fractional currency with silver coins of the value of ten, twenty-five and fifty cents, so rapidly as these coins could be minted; abolished the charge of one-fifth of one per centum on the coinage of gold, making the coinage of gold at the mints of the {278} United States free; repealed the law limiting the aggregate amount of the circulating notes of the national banking associations, and the law for the withdrawal of national-bank currency from, and its redistribution among, the several "States" and Territories; ordered the Secretary of the Treasury in issuing new circulating notes to the national banking associations to retire United States legal tender notes to the amount of eighty per centum of such issues, until the United States legal tender notes should be reduced to three hundred millions of dollars, and after January 1st, 1879, to redeem these legal tender notes in coin on their presentation at the office of the Assistant Treasurer of the United States in the city of New York, in sums of not less than fifty dollars; and, to enable the Secretary of the Treasury to do this, authorized him to use any unappropriated surplus revenue which might be, from time to time, in the Treasury, and to sell bonds of the description mentioned in the Act of July 14th, 1870, in such amounts as he should find necessary to accomplish the purpose. [Sidenote: The inflation bill of 1874 and the veto of it by the President.]