Mr. President, I know of no way to substitute the Treasury of the United States for the banking experience of the last ten centuries. We have the experience of the past, we have the experience of our own nation, we have the experience of the world. Now, do we propose to throw aside this experience, and to launch our boat upon a wild and uncertain sea, an ocean of expansion and no payments? Sir, there are very few persons within the range of my acquaintance who desire expansion of an irredeemable currency. Certainly the people of Michigan have had abundance of experience of that kind. But wherever you go you will find two classes of men who are making a great noise about "more money." One is the speculator, the impecunious speculator, who has, perhaps, bought real estate and given a mortgage, and thinks that his only chance is to reduce the value of your currency until it falls so low that the people would rather take his land than hold your money; and the other is the man who has issued his paper without intending to pay when it matures, and who can borrow no more money upon any terms until he pays what he already owes. On the 14th of January, 1875, the act for the resumption of specie payments became a law. Mr. Chandler was a member of the Senate when this bill passed. He had but one objection to it; the time fixed for resumption was unnecessarily remote. Neither present exigency nor needed preparation required the delay, and he believed it to be opposed alike to economy, patriotism, and public honor. But it was the best that could be secured; insistence upon an earlier date would have divided the friends of resumption, prevented the passage of any bill at that time, and postponed the day of specie payments. For these reasons Mr. Chandler favored the measure, and a few weeks later, when he retired from the Senate, it was with the consciousness that he had only voted for an irredeemable and inconvertible currency to meet the imperious exigencies of civil war, that he had opposed its undue expansion, that he had sustained every measure of contraction calculated to lessen the difficulties of the return to a sound basis, and that he finally had crowned his Senatorial career by support of a measure which insured the return of the government to the constitutional standard of values. CHAPTER XIX. SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR IN THE CABINET OF PRESIDENT GRANT.