just before the old Congress expires, the defeated party may pass a law reducing the pay of Congressmen to ten cents a day.’ “It will never do thus to put one Congress into the power of another, it would be an engine of wrong and injustice. For this reason, our fathers refused to put into the Constitution a clause that would prevent back pay. Now it will not do to say that a provision that has been deliberately rejected from the Constitution, is virtually there, and it will not do to say that it is just to call it theft and robbery for Congress to do what it has plainly the constitutional right to do. I use the word right in its legal sense. “Now, take another step. I hold in my hand here, a record of all the changes of pay that have been made since this Government was founded, and in every case,—I am not arguing now that it is right at all, I am only giving you a history of it—in every single instance when Congress has raised its pay, it has raised it to take effect from the first day of the session of the Congress. Six times Congress has increased its own pay, and every time it made the pay retroactive. I say again, I am not arguing that this was right and proper; I am only arguing that it was lawful and constitutional to do it. In 1856, the pay was raised, and was made retroactive, for a year and four months, and the member of Congress from this district threw the casting vote that made it a law. That act raised the pay by a larger per cent. than the act of last Congress. Joshua R. Giddings was the one-hundredth man that voted aye. Ninety-nine voted no. Joshua R. Giddings’s vote the other way would have turned the score against it. That vote gave back pay for a year and four months. That vote gave Congress nine months’ back pay for a time when members would not have been entitled to any thing whatever, because, under the old law, they were paid only during the session. What did this district do? Did it call him a thief and a robber? A few weeks after that vote this district elected him to Congress for the tenth time. Have the ethics of the world changed since 1856? Would I be a thief and robber in 1873, if I had done what my predecessor did in 1856? In 1866, the pay was raised; that time it was put in the appropriation bill (a very important appropriation bill), a bill giving bounties to soldiers. It passed through the Senate and came to the House; there was a disagreement about it. Senator Sherman, of Ohio, had charge of the bill in the Senate, and voted against the increase of pay every time when it came up on its own merits, but he was out-voted. Finally it went to a committee of conference, and he was made chairman of the committee of conference. The conference report between the two houses was made in favor of the bill. Mr. Sherman brought in the report, saying when he brought it in, that, he had been opposed to the increase of pay, but the