thrive in the sun and air of equal laws and equal opportunities. It gathers its vitality from the conditions which surround it. It must breathe the atmosphere of the whole people, and renew its life in the fertilizing dews of their common humanity. It needs to be cherished and strengthened by ceaseless discipline and care, like the life of the body, and must wither and die under the shadow of aristocracy and privilege in whatever form.

In theory ours is a government of the people; but in practice it is rapidly degenerating into an oligarchy of grasping capitalists, wielding their power through our constantly multiplying corporations. Since the formation of the Government we have sold in all only one hundred and sixty million acres of the public domain, a large proportion of which was bought by non-resident owners for merely speculative purposes, and is to-day held back from settlement by our homeless people; but we have allowed two hundred million acres to fall into the remorseless grasp. of corporations, whose feudalization of land and labor I have indicated, while bills are now on the Speaker's table calling for the additional quantity of at least one hundred million acres. Can any thinking man face these facts and feel that the Republic is safe?

Can a government be called free whose citizens are made landless by its systematic policy? Can a republic, still in the day of its youth, be honestly lauded, in which the relative number of its land owners is constantly decreasing, while the obstacles to the acquisition of homes are constantly multiplied? Let it be remembered also that while these millions of acres are being surrendered to corporate wealth, and still other millions are passing into the hands of monopolists under the name of military bounties, college scrip, swamp land grants, and Indian treaties, Congress, as if the absolute slave of these monopolies, persistently refuses to legislate for the workingman and pioneer. A bill to prevent the further sale of the whole of our remaining public domain which is fit for tillage, except to actual settlers under the preemption and homestead laws, would prove a more beneficent and far-reaching-measure than even the Homestead Law itself. It would simply carry out the avowed policy of the administration, and make it impregnable. It would intrench it in the hearts and homes of the people, and insure the Republican party a new lease of its life. It would, I am sure, be welcomed by ninety-nine hundredths of the people of the United States, and condemned by those only who believe in the gospel of plunder and spoliation. I challenge any man, of any party, to give me a single reason why Congress should not pass

such an act at once. I challenge any man to account for the repeated votes in this body against this proposition, without reference to the corporate and special interests to which I have referred, and whose will has uniformly taken the shape of law. For years have I striven for it in this House, and with increasing earnestness, as I have seen the public domain melting away under the shamelessly. prodigal policy of the government. The measure was voted down at the last session on the yeas and nays by a large majority, as it had been before, and I fear I shall not be able to try the question again at this session. We carried it as a measure applicable to a few States and Territories in July last, at the instance of their representatives, but our bill sleeps in the Senate Committee on Public Lands, and will know no waking, because it would inaugurate a policy threatening the profits which organized capital and financial rapacity hope to realize through still further raids upon the public lands. Let the people note the fact, and let their watchword henceforward be, the emancipation of the public domain, and the emancipation of themselves from their cruel and unnatural bondage to corporations and associated wealth.

REVIEW OF CONGRESSIONAL POLITICS.

CLOSING REMARKS AT DUBLIN, OCTOBER 25, 1868.

[This brief political autobiography fitly enough followed the Congressional canvass of this year. If its language, in some instances, should seem severe, the extraordinary character of the opposition which provoked it ought to be considered. In each successive contest, the warfare against Mr. Julian had increased in bitterness as it declined inpower; and when, all other methods having failed hopelessly, the attempt was made to get rid of him by re-districting the State so as to deprive him of the great body of his friends, and he was about to succeed in the new district, the most shameless example of organized ballot-stuffing, by pretended Republicans which followed, and has since been judicially proved, furnished some excuse for the use of expressive words.]

MY FRIENDS, Allow me now to dismiss the subject of our general politics, and beg your indulgence in some local and personal references which seem naturally to be suggested by the Congressional canvass just closed. My political career among you has been a long one, and, in some respects, quite peculiar in its character; and your intimate connection with it must invest the subject with an interest in some considerable degree common to you and to me. In what I shall say, I must disregard the injunction to "Let by-gones be by-gones," because I do not think it applicable to the case in hand.

My first connection with the general politics of the Burnt District was in 1848. Up to that time I was a member of the Whig party, but the nomination of a large Louisiana slaveholder for the Presidency brought me to a dead halt. I could not support him without doing violence to the most decided and deep-rooted convictions of duty, earnestly as I desired to live in peace and unity with my old party friends. Very naturally, therefore, I became identified with the Free Soil organization, which was then springing into life in Wayne County, and which sent me as a delegate to the Buffalo Convention. Subsequently I was made an Elector for the district, and as such I made by far the most vigorous canvass of my life, encountering, at every stage of it, an amount of partisan rancor and personal abuse which have seldom, if ever, fallen to the lot of any politician. I never, for a single moment, doubted that I was in the right; and, having a good constitution

and an excellent pair of lungs, I made the hills vocal with my Free Soil speeches, speaking two to three times per day, and "fought it out on that line" to the end. My opponents used to say that my audiences consisted of "eleven men, three boys, two women, and a negro," and there was sometimes more truth than poetry in this inventory; but I despised not the day of small things. Our independent movement did not carry the electoral vote of a single State, and our standard-bearer himself was unworthy the support of honest men, as subsequent events have more than proved; but this organized stand for the right, and protest against the wrong, produced some very remarkable results. It saved Oregon from slavery. It gave cheap postage to the people. It launched the policy of free homes on the public domain which prevailed years afterwards; and as "the child is father to the man," so this movement was the progenitor, certainly the forerunner and pathfinder, of the mightier one which rallied its hosts under Fremont in 1856, elected Lincoln in 1860, and carried the nation safely through the grandest civil conflict that ever convulsed a great people.

The triumph of the Whigs in this contest, paved the way for their utter rout and ruin in 1852, but they were temporarily elated, and showed no disposition whatever to conciliate and win back to their ranks those who had separated from the party and joined the Free Soil movement.

The supporters of this movement fully reciprocated the unfriendly feeling; and as early as the close of the year 1848 they declared their continued independence by nominating me for Congress. The Democrats, smarting under their defeat on the deceptive issue of the Nicholson Letter, and politically powerless in the District, were quite ready to take advantage of the angry feeling between the Whigs and Free Soilers which the Presidential canvass had aroused. Accordingly, in the spring of 1849, they were overtaken by an apparent spasm of anti-slavery virtue, which led them to mount the Free Soil platform, and zealously join hands with my radical friends in electing me to Congress. This led to the oft-repeated charge of a bargain between them and me, which I have so often explained to you as simply an agreement that if they would stand straight up and down on my platform, and proclaim it as their political gospel, I would allow them to vote for me for Congress, which arrangement was carried out in good faith on both sides. My election was a surprise alike to all parties, and the canvass sowed the seeds of bitterness which still rankles in the

breasts of a few men here and there throughout the district; but I believe no man, of any party, ever charged me with unfaithfulness, in the Thirty-first Congress, to the principles I had espoused at home. Braving all intimidation and danger, I stood shoulder to shoulder with Thaddeus Stevens and the handful of Radicals in the Congress of 1849, in opposing the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, the Texas Boundary Bill, the abandonment of the Wilmot Proviso, and the organization of the House in the interest of slavery; and no loyal man to-day will find fault with my action.

In 1851, in pursuance of the wishes of my friends, I became a

candidate for reëlection. The chances of success were exceedingly doubtful. The Compromise Measures had silenced antislavery agitation. Lower-law sermons and Union-saving meetings were the order of the day throughout the Free States. The Whigs of the district no longer even pretended to stand by the Wilmot Proviso, while the Democrats were evidently growing uneasy, and their leading men were openly hostile to any further union with "abolitionism." But I believe it safe to say, that if I had been willing to trim my sails to meet the sickly winds of compromise which had set in; if I had been willing to soften down and shade off the right-angled character of my anti-slavery principles, I might have been returned to Congress then, instead of biding my time through a probation of nearly ten years. But I would not flinch; and when I tasted political death, I had the consolation of knowing that I went down with my colors flying.

In the following year a higher honor than that of a seat in Congress was conferred on me, in my nomination for the VicePresidency, on the ticket with John P. Hale. In 1853 I made my annual canvass of the district, still endeavoring to indoctrinate the minds of the people with my own views. In 1854, when "popular sovereignty" sprouted out of the grave of the Wilmot Proviso, my restoration to greater political activity and to popular favor seemed natural and easy; but a new power in our politics, called Know Nothingism, made its apparition, and completely balked any such project. If I had so far played the mere politician as to join the lodges of this new order, at an early day, my success could scarcely have been doubtful; but I fought it, with all my might, till it disappeared from our politics. The odds against me for a time were overwhelming. Nearly all my old radical friends joined the order. The old Whigs were in it almost to a man, and a very large per cent. of the Democrats; and at my worst estate, I believe I had less than twelve political friends,