“In Mr. Ames’s first testimony he names sixteen members of Congress to whom he offered the stock, and says that eleven of them bought it, but he sets Mr. Garfield down among the five who did not buy it.
“He says: ‘He (Garfield) did not pay for it or receive it.... He never paid any money on that stock or received money on account of it.’ Let me add that the last grant to the Union Pacific Railroad was by the act of July, 1864, and that Oakes Ames had nothing to do with the Credit Mobilier till more than two years after that date.
“The point to which I took exception to the report of the committee was this: the report held that Mr. Ames and Mr. Garfield did agree upon the purchase of the stock, and that Mr. Garfield received three hundred and twenty-nine dollars on account of it. I insisted that the evidence did not warrant that conclusion, and rose in my place in the House, and announced that I should make that statement good before the American public; that I held myself responsible to demonstrate that the committee was wrong; that although they charged me with no wrong, they still had made a mistake of fact, which was against the evidence and an injustice to me. Soon after, I published a pamphlet of twenty-eight pages, in which I carefully and thoroughly reviewed all the testimony relating to me. I have now stood before the American people, since the eighth day of May, 1873, announcing that the following propositions were proven concerning myself: that I had never agreed even to take the stock of Mr. Ames; that I never subscribed for it, never did take it, never received any dividends from it, and was never in any way made a beneficiary by it. Seven thousand copies of that pamphlet have been distributed through the United States. Almost every newspaper in the United States has had a copy mailed to it. Every member of the Forty-Second Congress—Democrat and Republican—had a copy, and there is not known to me a man who, having read my review, has denied its conclusiveness of those propositions after having read them. I have seen no newspaper review of it that denies the conclusiveness of the propositions. It is for these reasons that a great public journal, the New York Evening Post, said a few days ago that on this point ‘General Garfield’s answer had been received by the American people as satisfactory.’ [Applause.] If there is any gentleman in this audience, who desires to ask any question concerning the Credit Mobilier, I shall be glad to hear it. [No response.] If not, would it not be about as well to modify the talk on that subject hereafter? [Applause.]
“Now the next thing I shall mention is a question purely of official conduct—and that is a subject which has grown threadbare in this community, and yet I desire your attention to it for a few moments. I refer to
THE INCREASE OF OFFICIAL SALARIES,
one year and a half ago. First, what are the accusations concerning me?
“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, 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.