As we advance through the multitude of General Garfield’s congressional speeches, selecting here and there some typical extract, his report on “Black Friday” attracts attention. Every one remembers the gold panic of September 24, 1869. It was the greatest financial conspiracy known to history. Wall Street, the scene of innumerable frauds, snares, conspiracies, and panics, never saw any thing to compare with the historic “Black Friday.” The House of Representatives appointed the Committee of Banking and Currency of which General Garfield had been made chairman at the opening of the Forty-First Congress, to investigate the causes of that financial convulsion. He went to New York, _incog._, managed to get into the private room of the Gold Board, where the matter was undergoing a secret investigation. Here General Garfield made notes, and got his clue. When he could stay no longer, he left a clever substitute. Each witness was attached as he left the building and hurried down to Washington before he could be primed. General Garfield’s examination of the witnesses was adroit and successful. The taciturn and self-poised Gould, the wily and exuberant Jim Fisk, alike were compelled to lay open the full details of the scheme. General Garfield’s report, made March 1,1870, goes to the bottom of this the darkest conspiracy ever planned. It reads like a novel, and contains the material for a whole library of fiction. Some idea of the foul plot may be had from the following summary and extracts: BLACK FRIDAY. “On the first of September, 1868, the price of gold was one hundred and forty-five. During the autumn and winter it continued to decline, interrupted only by occasional fluctuations, till in March, 1869, it touched one hundred and thirty and one-fourth (its lowest point for three years), and continued near that rate until the middle of April, the earliest period to which the evidence taken by the committee refers. At that time, Mr. Jay Gould, president of the Erie Railroad Company, bought seven millions of gold, and put up the price from one hundred and thirty-two to one hundred and forty. Other brokers followed his example, and by the twentieth of May had put up the price to one hundred and forty-four and seven-eighths, from which point, in spite of speculation, it continued to decline, and on the last day of July stood at one hundred and thirty-six.