“The Executive [Lincoln] is frequently compelled to affix his signature to bills of the highest importance, much of which he regards as wholly at war with the national interests. “To British free trade it is, as I have shown, that we stand indebted for the present Civil War. Had our legislation been of the kind which was needed for giving effect to the Declaration of Independence, that great hill region of the South, one of the richest, if not absolutely the richest in the world, would long since have been filled with furnaces and factories, the laborers in which would have been free men, women, and children, white and black, and the several portions of the Union would have been linked together by hooks of steel that would have set at defiance every effort of the ‘wealthy capitalists’ of England for bringing about a separation. Such, however, and most unhappily, was not our course of operation. Rebellion, therefore, came, bringing with it an almost entire stoppage of the societary movement, with ruin to a large proportion of those of the men...” “As a consequence, poor as was then our Government, and unemployed as were then so large a portion of our people, we were compelled to [loan from abroad] millions upon millions of dollars worth of the machinery of war, and there to encounter all the obstacles that could decently be thrown in our way by men who prayed openly for the success of the rebellion.” “When the present war shall have been closed there will be another to be fought, and that one will be with England...but it is not now with [cannons] that she chiefly seeks to fight us. It is in the Halls of Congress she is to be met.” “The whole South now requires reorganization, and one of the first steps in that direction should be found in furnishing machinery of circulation...If the Government does not supply that machinery, who is there that can or will do so? Look carefully, I pray you, my dear sir, at the vast field that is to be occupied, and at the great work that is to be done, and then wonder with me that the Government should permit its soldiers to perish in the field, while it is debating the terms of a loan to be made to it by men all of whose interests are to be promoted by a diminution of the circulation and an increase of the rate of interest. Let our soldiers be paid, let the credit of the Government be once again re-established, let the rate of interest be kept down, and let the Treasury reassert its independence, and all will yet go well... “A single decade of the system above described would suffice for placing us, in this respect, side by side with England. At the close of another, [England] would be left far behind, and we should then have vindicated our claim to that position in the world of which our people so often talk.”