piteous lamentations over the distresses of the poor man. When, sir, did these gentlemen first learn to sympathize with the poor man? Was it at a time when they were taxing cotton, cloth, leather, iron, coal, and salt? Was it, sir, when they were levying protective duties on these articles, all of which enter into the poor man's consumption? The gentleman from Vermont [Mr. Marsh] pours out the fulness of his sympathetic heart over the poor man's tax on tea and coffee, and then he bewails the downfall of protection. You, sir, sympathize with the poor man's tax! you, who would tax all the necessaries of life to give protection to some overgrown manufacturer! Strange and incomprehensible logic, that we must tax the poor man's hat, his shoes, his shirt, his plough, his axe-everything, in short, which he consumes, not for the benefit of the manufacturer! but your sympathetic hearts will not allow you to tax his tea and coffee to support your Government in time of war. You would send him shoeless, hatless, and shirtless, to cultivate his ground without implements, unless he pays tribute to the manufacturers; only give him tea that is not taxed, and you are satisfied. You would lay his diseased body on a pallet that is taxed; give him taxed medicine from a spoon that is taxed; you give him untaxed tea in a cup that is taxed; he dies, and you tax his winding sheet, and consign him to a grave that is dug with a spade that is taxed, and then insult his memory by saying that you gave him untaxed tea. Why, sir, if I thus outraged the poor man's common sense during life, insulted him in his last moments, and whined a hypocritical sympathy over his tomb when dead, I should expect his ghost to rise up in judgment against me. Other gentlemen may do as they please for me and my people, we go for our country. We write on our banner, "millions for defence, but not one cent for tribute." Tax our property, tax our supplies, ay, tax our tea and coffee, tax us millions on millions, for .the defence of our country's flag and our country's honor, and we will pay it; but if you ask us to pay one cent of tribute to your lordly manufacturers, we rise up in rebellion against you. Take our property for the defence of our national honor, but do not plunder us to make a rich man more rich. Gentlemen affect great alarm at the thought of direct taxation. The gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Stephens] seemed peculiarly nervous on this subject. He lashed himself into a passion, as other gentlemen have done, declared emphatically that he never would levy direct taxes on his constituents to carry on this "unnecessary and unconstitutional war." I beg gentlemen to quiet their nerves; nobody has asked them to vote for direct taxes; and whenever the President, or Secretary of the Treasury, or the Committee on Ways and Means, ask for such a tax, as necessary and proper, it will be time enough to discuss it. I shall omit much of what I intended to say, reserving for another occasion my views on the question of indemnity and future security, and upon the disposition which Congress may make of newly-acquired territory. These and their kindred subjects will, I hope, more properly engage our attention at a later period of the session. The Government needs money, and we delay it in needless discussion. I will vote for a loan, I will vote for treasury notes, and for a tax on tea and coffee; I will vote for men, regulars and volunteers; in short, sir, I will vote for anything and everything that may be needed to prose cute this war to such a conclusion as the Government can accept without dishonor. My constituents will sustain me in this. They are patriots they go for their own country, and against Mexico; and they expect of their representative fealty to their views. Their motto has ever been, "Our country-may she be always right; but right or wrong, our country." BOUNTY LAND BILL. In the House of Representatives, May 8, 1848.-The Bounty Land Bill being under consideration in Committee of the Whole, Mr. BROWN said: It has not been my custom to enter very fully into the debates which occur in the House from day to day; but on questions like the one now under consideration, it may be permitted me to express my views, and to assign briefly the reasons why, in my judgment, the main features of the bill ought to receive the favorable consideration of Congress. If any class of the public's numerous servants are more entitled than another to the special regard of the law-making and bounty-dispensing power of Government, it is the soldiers-the men who encounter the toils, the dangers, the hardships and privations of the camp-the men who guard the nation's honor at the peril of their lives, and sacrifice, at the shrine of patriotism, the comforts and security of domestic quiet. It is not my purpose to tax the republic with ingratitude, or to complain that the soldier's compensation is wholly inadequate to the service performed. Albeit the seven dollars a month which the Government doles out to him bears no sort of proportion to the magnitude of his labor. Not only do you require unceasing toil, but you demand the free exposure of his person to the elements, and the still freer surrender of his life on the field of battle. Nay, you exact a more than slavish obedience to the iron will of a military master, whom your laws have appointed to command him. You and I think we render a tolerable equivalent for our eight dollars per day, when we meet in this hall, on our own adjournment, sit here some three or four hours, and then close the business of the day. Can it be that we shall regard other men, who are our equals in political rights-men, equal to us in all the elements which compose that most extraordinary character, an American citizen -as sufficiently compensated for the severe toils of a soldier's life when we dole out to them seven dollars for a month's service? I am not for increasing the monthly pay of the soldier, but I am clearly in favor of doing him justice by another means. I would not bankrupt the exchequer, nor compel the Government to go on borrowing to a greater extent than may be absolutely necessary. Happily, the Government has other means of paying her patriotic soldiery-means most abundant and most appropriate for this purpose. The public lands, of which the United States is the undisputed proprietor, can be most advantageously, most wisely and properly devoted to this object. Land to the soldier is often equivalent to, sometimes better than, money-it gives him a home. This, to the young enthusiast, who, forgetful of him self, and casting care to the winds, has perilled all and lost all in the service of his country, is the richest reward that his country can bestow. It raises him at once above the pressure of want, it affords an outlet to industry, and inspires his self-confidence. It does more: it rears before him a lasting monument of his country's gratitude, awakening and keeping alive the noble impulses that led him to the tented field. If you would touch the chords of patriotism, and cause them to vibrate in delightful harmony, you must not grudge the soldier his honest earnings, nor pay him with a stinting hand. You do put poorly reward his toils who wins an empire, if you give him his daily pay and nothing more. There is not a scavenger in your streets that does not get as much as that. The Government is rich in its landed possessions, and out of this abundance I would freely reward the soldier's honest toils. I would give him a home, make him feel that he had served his country to some purpose. What if it take ten millions of acres of land? I care not, sir, if it take ten times ten millions-who is better entitled to it than the man who protected, defended, perchance won it on the battlefield? This Government has many hundred millions of acres of land; it can be no great stretch of liberality to bestow a small portion of it on the men who gave us the whole. The gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Vinton] has assumed some strange, most extraordinary positions. He says, we did not give bounty lands to the soldiers of the Revolution, and he thence argues that we should not grant the bounties contemplated in this bill. My colleague [Mr. Thompson] has already answered, that the revolutionary soldiers had been pensioned by the Government. A gentleman near me [Mr. Collamer] says the militia were not pensioned. But the gentleman knows that the militia were paid by the states respectively, in whose service they chiefly were, and to the utmost capacity of the states to pay. If they were not fully compensated, the reason will be found in an absolute inability to do so, until time had transferred them to another and, I trust, a better world. But if the Government has for a long time failed in the performance of her duty to her soldiers, is it therefore to be insisted that she never shall perform it? It is not yet too late to do justice to these men of iron will. If any of them have survived the ravages of time, I would to-day greet them with the intelligence that this Government will no longer withhold its bounty. To me it matters not whether a soldier belongs to the regular line or fights as a militiaman: he equally devotes himself to his country, and in the one position as in the other is alike entitled to his country's bounty and her gratitude. When the gentleman from Ohio reminds us that bounty lands were not given to the soldiers of the Revolution, and that they were otherwise badly paid, he forgets that these illustrious men fought for their homes, their altars, and their firesides. Death was then the reward of cowardice-liberty the price of victory. There were no soldiers that were not citizens; no citizens that were not soldiers. All united in the struggle. It was a common struggle, and a common triumph. Each man gave to himself his own reward. When all were soldiers, they had no one but themselves to look to for bounty lands or other favors. Before the gentleman twits us with the remark that we are more liberal than our fathers, let him remember that our fathers were less able than we to be liberal, and had less reason to be so. They did their own fighting; we do ours by proxy. They had no one but themselves to pay; we have to pay the men who do our fighting. In the days of the Revolution every man was a soldier; now, about one in fifty has gone out to battle. Before the gentleman cites the fact that our revolutionary fathers did not receive bounty lands, let him contrast the condition of this country, at the close of the revolutionary struggle, with its present position in the scale of nations. He will see thirteen small colonies just emerging from a seven years' conflict with the most powerful nation in the world, worn down with strife, without credit and in debt, watched by the tiger eye of monarchy in the Old World, and without one honest republican face in all Christendom to encourage her with its sympathetic smiles. What could such a country do? Look first on that picture, and now on this. We have twenty-nine states, and territories boundless as half a continent; we are comparatively out of debt, with unlimited credit; above the frowns of the world, honored, respected, feared by monarchy wherever it yet remains, and loved by our republican brethren throughout the world. The gentleman who cites what our fathers did not do, and could not do, as a controlling reason for our action, is full seventy years behind the age in which he lives. The gentleman has another reason, if possible less cogent than the first, for denying this bounty to the soldier. If we give lands to the soldier, he says the speculators will buy them for half, perhaps for less than half, their value. I did not expect to hear such an objection from a source so eminent. It is unworthy of the high source from which it emanates. We owe a debt, but will not pay it because our creditor intends to make an improvident use of the money. As well, sir, might you say that you will not pay the soldier in Mexico his seven dollars per month, because he intended to pay a sutler two prices for his merchandise, as to say you will not give him bounty land because he may sell it for half its value. The gentleman is much too kind to the soldier. Because he may be cheated in the sale of his land, out of very kindness the gentleman will not give him land at all. "Half a loaf is better than no bread;" and though a soldier might be cheated of one-half your bounty, the remaining half, I fancy, would be better than the gentleman's proposition to give him nothing. It is no business of the Government what the soldier does with his land. Let her discharge her duty, and rely upon the soldier to protect his own interest. In the protection he gave his country, he afforded the best evidence of his capacity to take care of himself. But, says the gentleman, these lands are pledged for the redemption of the war debt. The gentleman forgets his own vote to grant bounties in land after that pledge was given. He then, doubtless, thought, and thought correctly, that so long as the interest on the debt is paid, and the stock redeemed as it falls due, the holders of public securities do not care a fig what you do with the public lands. The stock was never taken on any pledge of lands for its redemption, but on the good faith of the Government that the interest should be paid and the debt redeemed at maturity. For myself, I have no fears of a failure to meet these reasonable and just expectations of the stockholders, whatever may be your disposition of any part or the whole of the public lands. The gentleman enters into a minute calculation of the probable proceeds of the sales of the public lands, and warns us, if we make these grants, that there will be fearful deficiency in the revenue for the next year. I now understand him as admitting that the estimates for the present fiscal year will be fully realized; but he predicts, with great confidence, that there will be decided diminution in the receipts for the year ending June 30, 1849. Some months since, the gentleman staked his reputation as a financial prophet that the estimates of the Secretary of the Treasury for this year would be falsified by at least eight millions of dollars. But two months now remain of the present fiscal year. The gentleman's own calculations have been already exceeded by near five millions of dollars; and it is morally certain that the Secretary's estimates will be fully equalled, and in all human probability exceeded, by at least one million of dollars. The gentleman has shown himself a false prophet, and he must excuse us if we decline to repose implicit confidence in his predictions for the future. "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." I am disinclined to indulge in evil forebodings as to the approaching year. The gentleman sees nothing but impenetrable gloom; to my vision the sky is bright, the day dawns beautifully; no cloud is seen, and no storm is anticipated. I am as confident that it will be a year of national and individual prosperity as the gentleman is that it will bring bankruptcy and ruin to the state and people. Much, I am free to admit, depends on the result of the presidential election. I have no doubt of Democratic triumph, and therefore do not doubt that we shall have a season of universal and uninterrupted prosperity. Reference has been made, in the course of this discussion, to the cost of the public lands; and we have been admonished that vast sums of money have been paid from the general treasury for their acquisition, which, it is said, ought to be returned before we dispose of them too lavishly as bounties to soldiers. I have been at the trouble to compile, from official sources, a statement of the general results of the land operations of the Government up to January, 1846. The main features of this statement have not, I apprehend, been materially altered by the operations since that time. The public lands have cost the Government an average of twenty-three cents per acre: Up to January, 1846, she had extinguished the Indian title to, surveyed, and offered for sale Sold up to that date Revenue from sales up to that time Whole cost of lands at 23 cents per acre Remaining unsold 333,215,648 acres. 93,872,846 acres. $130,280,156 77,130,498 53,149,658 239,342,802 acres. It will thus be seen that the net profit has been fifty-three millions of dollars and upwards, and that we have yet on hand near two hundred and forty millions of acres. This calculation does not include the Indian annuities, or the expense of our Indian wars, most of which have grown, I admit, mediately or immediately, out of our landed operations, and are, therefore, to some extent, chargeable to this account. But I must also remark that this calculation does not include the unsurveyed lands in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Nebraska; it does not include our vast Oregon possessions; and I suppose it need not be mentioned that both California and New Mexico have been excluded. Of these last it may be said, "we need not count our chickens before they are hatched;" but I will count them, and here express the opinion, that we are much more |