"Some gentlemen have their stock in their hands, while others, who have more money than they know what to do with, want it; and this, and this alone, is the question, to settle which we are called on to squander thousands of the people's money. What interest, let me ask, have the people in the settlement of this question? What difference is it to them whether the stock is owned by Judge Smith or Sam Wiggins? If any gentleman be entitled to stock in the bank, which he is kept out of possession of by others, let him assert his right in the Supreme Court, and let him or his antagonist, whichever may be found in the wrong, pay the costs of suit. It is an old maxim, and a very sound one, that he that dances should always pay the fiddler. Now, sir, in the present case, if any gentlemen whose money is a burden to them, choose to lead off a dance, I am decidedly opposed to the people's money being used to pay the fiddler. No one can doubt that the examination proposed by this resolution must cost the State some ten or twelve thousand dollars; and all this to settle a question in which the people have no interest, and about which they care nothing. These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people; and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people's money to settle the quarrel."
The resolution had declared that the bank practised various methods which were "to the great injury of the people." Lincoln took the occasion to announce his ideas of the people and the politicians.
"If the bank really be a grievance, why is it that no one of the real people is found to ask redress of it? The truth is, no such oppression exists. If it did, our people would groan with memorials and petitions, and we would not be permitted to rest day or night till we had put it down. The people know their rights, and they are never slow to assert and maintain them when they are invaded. Let them call for an investigation, and I shall ever stand ready to respond to the call. But they have made no such call. I make the assertion boldly, and without fear of contradiction, that no man who does not hold an office, or does not aspire to one, has ever found any fault of the bank. It has doubled the prices of the products of their farms, and filled their pockets with a sound circulating medium; and they are all well pleased with its operations. No, sir, it is the politician who is the first to sound the alarm (which, by the way, is a false one). It is he who, by these unholy means, is endeavoring to blow up a storm that he may ride upon and direct. It is he, and he alone, that here proposes to spend thousands of the people's public treasure, for no other advantage to them than to make valueless in their pockets the reward of their industry. Mr. Chairman, this work is exclusively the work, of politicians—a set of men who have interests aside from the interests of the people, and who, to say the most of them, are, taken as a mass, at least one long step removed from honest men. I say this with the greater freedom, because, being a politician myself, none can regard it as personal."
The speech was published in full in the "Sangamo Journal" and the editor commented:
"Mr. Lincoln's remarks on Mr. Linder's bank resolution in the paper are quite to the point. Our friend carries the true Kentucky rifle, and when he fires he seldom fails of sending the shot home."
OLD SECOND PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS.
During the special session of the legislature convened in the fall of 1839 (the first one held at Springfield), the House of Representatives occupied this church, the State House being unfinished. At the short special session which opened November 23, 1840, the House first went into the Methodist church, but on the second day Representative John Logan (father of General John A. Logan) offered a resolution "that the Senate be respectfully requested to exchange places of convening with this House for a short time on account of the impossibility of the House discharging its business in so small a place as the Methodist church." This was adopted, and the House moved over to the Second Presbyterian church. At this special session the Whigs were interested in preventing a sine die adjournment (because they desired to protect the State bank, which had been authorized in 1838 to suspend specie payment until after the adjournment of the next session of the General Assembly), and to this end they sought to break the quorum. All the Whigs walked out, except Lincoln and Joseph Gillespie, who were left behind to demand a roll-call when deemed expedient. A few were brought in by the sergeant-at-arms. Lincoln and Gillespie, perceiving that there would be a quorum if they remained, started to leave; and finding the doors locked, Lincoln raised a window, and both men jumped out—an incident, as Mr. Herndon says, which Lincoln "always seemed willing to forget." It was in this church, too, that Lincoln delivered an address before the Washingtonian Temperance Society, on Washington's birthday, in 1842. The church was erected in 1839, and stood until torn down, some thirty years later, to make room for a new edifice.—J. McCan Davis.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S FIRST PROTEST AGAINST SLAVERY.
One other act of his in this session cannot be ignored. It is a sinister note in the hopeful chorus of the Tenth Assembly. For months there had come from the Southern States violent protests against the growth of abolition agitation in the North. Garrison's paper, the "infernal Liberator," as it was called in the pro-slavery part of the country, had been gradually extending its circulation and its influence; and it already had imitators even on the banks of the Mississippi. The American Anti-slavery Society was now over three years old. A deep, unconquerable conviction of the iniquity of slavery was spreading through the North. The South felt it and protested, and the statesmen of the North joined them in their protest. Slavery could not be crushed, said the conservatives. It was sanctioned by the Constitution. The South must be supported in its claims, and agitation stopped. But the agitation went on, and riots, violence, and hatred pursued the agitators. In Illinois, in this very year, 1837, we have a printing-office raided and an anti-slavery editor, Elijah Lovejoy, killed by the citizens of Alton, who were determined that it should not be said among them that slavery was an iniquity.