It is true that the Republican majority in Congress had not taken this high ground concerning the public credit and sound money without some wavering. The President himself had become frightened by the panic of the autumn of 1873, and in his annual message of December 1st following had made recommendations that might be regarded as favorable to an inflation of the existing body of paper money. His party friends in Congress very soon produced a bill which, among other things, provided for the increase of the United States notes and the national bank notes to the extent of about one hundred millions of dollars, and passed it. But the President had either thought the question out more fully, or had been in receipt of some very sound {279} advice, after he wrote the message of December 1st, 1873. On the 22d of April, 1874, he sent a special message to Congress vetoing the bill. This stand of the President recalled the Republicans in Congress from their economic aberrations, and set them again upon the course which led to the Act of the 14th of January, 1875. While at the moment this law for the resumption of specie payments in the short period of four years, or rather less, from the time of its enactment seemed a rather hazardous, not to say desperate, move on the part of the Republicans, it soon became manifest that they could have done nothing so calculated to strengthen the hold of the party upon the solid and conservative men of the country as just this very thing. Many of these men who had usually voted with the Republicans disapproved of the Southern policy of the party, and were on the point of turning against it. With the Resumption Act the financial policy of the Republican party, and of the country, was dragged to the front, and the Southern policy was forced backward, and made to constitute a less prominent issue in the campaign of 1876. This was not only wise party management, but it was also a fortunate thing for the entire country. The country was not yet in a position to endure a Democratic administration, and, on the other hand, it was surfeited with reconstruction Republican administrations. It wanted a sound money Republican administration, which would devote itself to the development of the economic interests of the whole people, and would let the "State" governments in the South have a chance to work out their own salvation. And this was just what it got in the election of 1876, and in the administration of President Rutherford B. Hayes. {280} CHAPTER XIII THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1876 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES