Page:Confederate Portraits.djvu/233

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And the people cheered him for his candor and au- dacity.

As for that mysterious phantom, the money power, which broods, like a shadow, over the young twentieth century, this Boanerges of liberty divined, detected, and defied it sixty years ago, in a little different form, but in language which might come from the White House to- day. *' I have perceived that this mischief is widespread, this corruption greater, this tendency to the destruction of the country is more dangerous. The tendency to place the whole government under the money power of the nation is greater and greater." ^^

And while many of these protests were uttered in the name of the sacred principle of State Rights, let that principle itself once impose any obnoxious restraint, and its sanctity became as questionable as that of any other. Thus, in opposing certain obstructions to a projected scheme, he cries out : *' Public opinion will take them away, even though a sovereign state may stand up for them. Nothing else can reach Pennsylvania in this mat- ter but public opinion, and public opinion will prevail in Pennsylvania as it has done elsewhere." ^^ And the pub- lic opinion of the world finally prevailed in all the States of the Confederacy, in spite of Toombs and thousands like him, with their inviolable sovereignty.

In all these various causes of opposition there was the same impetuous ardor of argument, the same splendid fury of invective, which, backed by the masterful pres-

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