MR. VAN BUREN'S ADMINISTRATION.

Speech in the House of Representatives, April 17, 1840—In Committee of the Whole, on the general appropriation bill.

The House having resolved itself into Committee of the Whole on the State of the Union, on the bill to provide for the civil and diplomatic expenditures of the government for the year 1840, and the general policy of the administration being under discussion, Mr. BROWN spoke substantially as follows:

MR. CHAIRMAN: Since the commencement of the present session of Congress, it has been my custom rather to listen to the views of other gentlemen than to present any of my own. I have hitherto been a silent member, not from any indifference on my part as to what was passing, or any unwillingness to give expression to my opinion, but from an almost insuperable aversion to engaging in a general scramble for place on this floor. And now that I have arisen to address the committee, it would be a fraud upon its members if I did not frankly admit that it is not so much my purpose to discuss the bill under consideration, as to take part in a desultory debate which has been going on for the last ten or fifteen days. If, in the course of remark in which I design indulging, it shall become necessary for me to allude to the public or private character of any distinguished citizen of this country, I shall do it in that spirit of courtesy which becomes one gentleman speaking of another, and with all due regard to the station which it is my good fortune to occupy. I shall not indulge myself in a train of remark better suited to the medium of a grog shop than to the hall of legislation. The example has been set me by one gentleman [Mr. Ogle], of speaking of a prominent member of the other branch of the Legislature as "a common liar;" and by another [Mr. Stanly], of declaring that a distinguished Senator is a fiend incarnate, fit only to be associated with the howling spirits of the vasty deep. I cannot consent, sir, to follow such an example, however distinguished the source from which it comes. leave the classical and beautiful phrases of liar and fiend to the exclusive use of the more refined and elegant gentlemen who belong to the party that claims for itself all the wealth, all the talents, and all the decency of the country. Plain, unpretending Loco Foco as I am, rude and uncouth, I will not attempt to soar with these gentlemen into the regions of space, but shall content myself with appearing what I really am--respectful and courteous to every man, and demanding from every man that respect and courtesy which I extend to others. I assure you, Mr. Chairman, I have not the slightest inclination to distinguish myself by the use of expressions better suited to the mouth of a street bully than to the lips of a member of Congress; and I leave honorable gentlemen to the sole occupancy of this new field into which they have gone, free to reap and enjoy all the laurels that may be gathered there, undisturbed by any act or expression of mine. My object is to discuss principles, not characters. I am now about to enter the grand political arena,

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which has stretched its gigantic dimensions before me; but before I do so, I may as well take a very cursory view of the bill nominally under discussion; and, in doing this, I have an especial favor to ask of the senior members of this House. It is this: point out to me such items in this bill as are objectionable; tell me in what the objection consists; ought the whole item to be stricken out, or only a part? and, if only a part, how much? I ask this, and I do it in all sincerity. It is necessary for me to have some further intelligence on the subject, to enable me to act advisedly. One of the pledges which I gave my constituents, and which I am resolved to carry out, was to aid in reforming the abuses of this government, if, indeed, any existed, and to reduce its expenditures, if they could be reduced, consistent with the public faith and the substantial interest of the country. I am here, sir, for that purpose; and now is the appropriate time to commence the great work of reform. I am not sufficiently familiar with government to know which of the expenditures proposed may be dispensed with, or whether, indeed, the whole of them are not absolutely necessary. It is, therefore, no idle interrogatory, but one propounded with feelings of deep sincerity, and to which an answer is most earnestly solicited. Which of the proposed items of expenditures in this bill may be stricken out? We are told that the bill proposes an expenditure of nine millions of dollars; and that nine millions is an enormous sum to expend in the civil and diplomatic departments of a Democratic administration. True, sir, nine millions of dollars is a large, if you please, an enormous sum, but twice nine millions would be a sum much more enormous; and yet who will say that if the honor, or the substantial interest of the nation required the expenditure, that the appropriation ought not to be made, and made promptly? The gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Ogle] objects to that item in the bill which proposes the appropriation of fifteen hundred dollars to the clerk employed by the government to sign land patents; and, if I understood the gentleman aright, it was not that the service was unequal to the money, or that the office ought to be abolished, but that the officer was politically opposed to the gentleman; and for this very substantial reason, he would refuse to compensate him for his labor. Sir, the service, or a great portion of it, has already been performed-performed under a positive contract, a solemn law of Congress. This is not denied, nor is it objected that the service has not been faithfully and efficiently performed; but the person performing it is objectionable to the gentleman, and this furnishes ample reason, in his judg ment, for violating the plighted faith of the nation, and disregarding the positive right of an officer of government. If the office has become a sinecure, and there is now no longer any necessity for it, let us, like men guided by reason, and not like children controlled by the caprices and prejudices of the moment, go to work, pay for the service already performed, and then repeal the law creating the office, and thus get clear of the officer. But do not disgrace yourselves and the nation by taking the service of a citizen, and then refusing to pay for it, even though that citizen be the son of a Democratic President; and let it be continually borne in mind that the present administration is nowise responsible for the passage of the law creating this office. It was passed under the late administration, and at a time when at least one house of

Congress (the Senate) was opposed to that administration, and for the reason, I suppose, that there was then thought to be a necessity for it. If that necessity has ceased, let the law cease with it. All I now say is, that we cannot, and if we could, we ought not, in this informal manner, to get clear of this responsibility of government. I think (and the gentleman, on reflection, I fancy, will concur with me) that he would much better have expended the time and treasure of the country ir proving the law to be no longer necessary, than in abusing the President and his son for offences of which they are even more innocent than himself, and the party with which he is associated.

Again: the gentleman would have us abolish the office of Minister to Russia, Spain, and Mexico, not by a repeal of the law creating them, but by refusing to vote the necessary compensation to the respective incumbents. This, to my palate, Mr. Chairman, smacks a little too strong of agrarianism. This is levelling as with the scythe of ruin, and with no regard to law, order, or the ordinary rules of common honesty. This is the worst species of Loco Foco agrarianism. Has the gentleman properly considered this subject? Is he quite certain that the honor and dignity, and even the pecuniary interest of the nation, would not suffer by such an act? If it would not, then, sir, if the gentleman will place his proposition before the House in proper form, I will vote for it; but I cannot consent, Loco Foco as I am-and therefore prepared, no doubt, in the judgment of the very eloquent gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Ogle], for the performance of any act, be it never so monstrous to put my country in a light so disreputable before the world, as to refuse to compensate our resident ministers abroad for services already performed; and thus, without inquiry and without reason, to reduce them from the dignity and pay of Ministers Plenipotentiary to a mere charge d'affaires. But, sir, the gentleman, I am sure, did not make the proposition seriously. He would not vote for it himself; he only wanted something to abuse the administration about; something out of which to make political capital; and, in the absence of all other things, he had brought forward this proposition, not wishing or expecting it to pass. The gentleman complains of the vast expenditures of government; and when asked wherein they have increased so enormously, he points us to the Post Office Department; but he does not inform us of the reasons which produced this state of affairs. Nothing is said about the vast increase of mail facilities in all parts of the country-nothing about the mail being transported over millions of square miles, which but a few years since was a savage waste-nothing about the mail being carried to the door of almost every hamlet in the west and south-west, which, under the administration of the younger Adams, to which the honorable gentleman has so often and so felicitously alluded, were total strangers to the post boy, and all the comforts and pleasures which he bears with him. The mail transportation has been greatly extended within the last eight years; but this is not the only, nor indeed the greatest reason which has produced the increase in the gross expenditures of this department. It will be found in the cause which has produced a multitude of political evils. It will be found issuing from that grand Pandora box, out of which has come all our political evils-the existence of banks, the redundancy of paper money,

a species of devouring reptile, which, like the locusts of Egypt, has overrun and laid waste the entire country. Whilst the receipts of the department have been regulated by a fixed specie standard, the expenditures have been placed under the captious and ever-varying dominion of an ephemeral paper currency-a currency which, though now exploded and exploding, has for the last five years placed a fictitious, nominal value on every particle of property and every species of labor. Thus, whilst the Post Office Department has been denied the right to increase its receipts by an increase in the rates of postage, a state of things is produced by which it is compelled to pay one thousand dollars for a service which, ten years ago, could have been performed for onehalf the amount. A contractor who, in 1839, would have carried the mail from Washington to Frederick for two thousand dollars, would, in 1840, demand twice that amount, because his coaches and horses cost him double, and he must necessarily pay twice the usual wages to his drivers. This grows out of an increase in the amount of paper money; which, however, does not add to the current receipts of the department. Under all these embarrassing circumstances, it is not wonderful that the expenditures are increased; the wonder rather is that the department should have been enabled to sustain itself at all. And that which is true in regard to the Post Office, is more or less so in reference to all the departments of government. I am aware, Mr. Chairman, that I shall be met at this point with the stereotyped declaration that the government is responsible to the people for this inordinate issue of paper money that it was the legitimate consequence of removing the deposites, and vetoing the Bank of the United States. Upon these points I shall, at a proper time, take issue with gentlemen, and endeavor to demonstrate the error into which they have fallen; at present, it would perhaps be wandering a little too far from the record, to go off upon these collateral, and, to this bill, immaterial issues. Though I will not now undertake to show what has not produced the present and pre-existing state of affairs, yet may I not expect the pardon of the committee, if I digress for a moment, for the purpose of showing what has, in my judgment, been the real and main cause of their production? Coming from a state upon which the evils of the day have fallen with more severity than upon any other portion of the Union, or of the world, and having been no idle observer of the grand panorama which has been exhibited in that country, I fancy that I can speak with some degree of assurance as to the causes which produced its fall, and point with some certainty to the pencil with which the awful picture was first marked out. I come from a section of the Union the most depressed and deplorable in all its monetary relations of any part of this vast and deeply-afflicted republic, affording a theme fruitful to the political economist, and presenting a melancholy example of the folly too often practised of abstracting capital from its active pursuits, and investing it in unproductive property. Mississippi can produce more real exports than the same amount of population in any part of the habitable globe; and yet, with all her energies, we find her, in a time of profound tranquillity, with the ports of the whole world thrown open to her great staples, prostrate, writhing under a load of oppression, to the sustaining of which, with all her energies, she is found inadequate. How and why is this? Let us not

be told that it grows out of any action of the federal government on the subjects of banks and currency. It will find its origin in another quarter in a too hasty, and, I fear, an improper disposition of the public lands. From the year 1833 to 1836, the Indian title to vast quantities of the most productive territory was extinguished, and it became the policy of the then administration-a policy almost universally approved by all parties-to hurry those lands as rapidly as possible into market. Most of them were situated in a frontier, or, at most, in a sparsely populated country. The wants of the settler, the sturdy pioneer of the south and south-west, whose little settlements here and there dotted the face of the wilderness, were soon supplied, and vast territories of the most productive soil in North America, that having been offered for sale and refused, now remained to be entered at the minimum of one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre. This opened a field for speculation too inviting long to remain unobserved, and the gloating eyes of avarice were turned upon it; a tide of emigrants, from all parts of the country, flowed in, gladdening the wilderness for a season, and filling the land with joy. They, in their turn, purchased their little homes, and seemed contented. The soil was to them what property in general was to our first parents, a common stock, and each individual to himself appropriated, for an almost nominal sum, such portion as his wants required. But this state of things did not long continue. Large companies of land speculators, chiefly merchants from your eastern cities, were organized, and vast sums of money consolidated and sent to the south-west, to be invested in "wild lands," that were wholly unproductive; thus abstracting from the current business a portion of its necessary support, to be invested where it could, by no possibility, produce one dollar of gain; depleting and causing necessary languor and unhealthiness in the channels from which it had been abstracted, and giving no additional vigor to the other departments of business, the lands being purchased for speculation, and not for cultivation. When this species of devouring locusts came among us, and began their work of demolition on the public domain, our hitherto quiet and contented citizen became changed in his nature; the serpent had crept into his Eden, and for the first time he conceived the new idea of making his fortune by land jobbing, rather than by tilling the soil. A portion, nay, the whole, of his surplus cash, which might better have been spent in improving his little farm, or discharging some honest obligation, was invested in "wild lands;" the pernicious example, like all others of similar character, was followed by his confiding neighbor. To-morrow some wanderer from his native home, in search of the new Elysium, finds this land of promise; pleased with the soil, and still more with the generous hospitality of its occupants, he determines to take up his abode. Land purchased at the minimum, is sold to our honest adventurer at twice that sum; and he soon becomes regularly installed into all the mysteries of living without work; for he, in his turn, to make a penny in an honest way, sells the same land for five dollars per acre. news sweeps over the country like an electric flash; the story of the grand speculation is on every tongue, and the same land is sold for ten dollars This is too much

per acre.

"The banner is flung to the wild winds free."

The