“There are several citizens in this town who have signed their names to statements in the newspapers during that discussion, declaring that Mr. Garfield had committed a theft, a robbery; that, to use the plain Saxon word, he was a thief,—that any man who took, or voted for a retroactive increase of salary, was a thief. In one of these articles it was argued in this wise: ‘If I hire a clerk in my bank on a certain salary, and he, having the key to my safe, takes out five hundred or five thousand dollars more than we agreed for, and puts it in his pocket, it is simply theft or robbery. He happened to have access to the funds, and he got hold of them; so did Congress. You can’t gloss it over,’ says the writer, ‘it is robbery.’ “Now, fellow-citizens, I presume you will agree that you can wrong even the devil himself, and that it is not right or manly to lie, even about Satan. I take it for granted that we are far enough past the passion of that period to talk plainly and coolly about the increase of salaries. “Now, in the first place, I say to-night, what I have said through all this tempest that for a Congress to increase its own pay and make it retroactive, is not theft, is not robbery, and you do injustice to the truth when you call it so. There is ground enough in which to denounce it without straining the truth. Now if Congress can not fix its own salary, who can? The Constitution of your country says, in unmistakable words, that ‘Senators and Representatives shall receive a compensation, to be ascertained by law, and paid out of the National Treasury.’ Nobody makes the law but Congress. It was a very delicate business in the beginning, for our fathers to make a law paying themselves money. They understood it so, and when they sent the Constitution out to the several States, the question was raised, whether it would not be better to put a curb upon Congress in reference to their own pay; and in several of the States suggestions were sent in. When the First Congress met, James Madison offered seventeen amendments to the Constitution; and, finally, Congress voted to send twelve of the proposed amendments to the country: one of them was this: ‘No law varying the compensation of the Senators or Representatives in Congress shall take effect until an election has intervened.’ In other words, the First Congress proposed that an amendment should be made to the new Constitution, that no Congress could raise its own pay, and make it retroactive. That was sent to the States for their ratification. The States adopted ten of those amendments. Two, they rejected; and this was one of the two. They said it should not be in the Constitution. The reason given for its rejection, by one of the wisest men of that time, was this. He said: ‘If we adopt it, this may happen; one party will go into power in a new Congress, but,