What I have been saying as to the effect produced by a reduction of the quantity of money relates to the whole country.  I now propose to show that it would produce a peculiar and permanent hardship upon the citizens of those States and Territories in which the public lands lie.  The land-offices in those States and Territories, as all know, form the great gulf by which all, or nearly all, the money in them is swallowed up.  When the quantity of money shall be reduced, and consequently everything under individual control brought down in proportion, the price of those lands, being fixed by law, will remain as now.  Of necessity it will follow that the produce or labor that now raises money sufficient to purchase eighty acres will then raise but sufficient to purchase forty, or perhaps not that much; and this difficulty and hardship will last as long, in some degree, as any portion of these lands shall remain undisposed of.  Knowing, as I well do, the difficulty that poor people now encounter in procuring homes, I hesitate not to say that when the price of the public lands shall be doubled or trebled, or, which is the same thing, produce and labor cut down to one half or one third of their present prices, it will be little less than impossible for them to procure those homes at all....

Well, then, what did become of him? (Postmaster General Barry) Why, the President immediately expressed his high disapprobation of his almost unequaled incapacity and corruption by appointing him to a foreign mission, with a salary and outfit of $18,000 a year!  The party now attempt to throw Barry off, and to avoid the responsibility of his sins.  Did not the President indorse those sins when, on the very heel of their commission, he appointed their author to the very highest and most honorable office in his gift, and which is but a single step behind the very goal of American political ambition?

I return to another of Mr. Douglas’s excuses for the expenditures of 1838, at the same time announcing the pleasing intelligence that this is the last one.  He says that ten millions of that year’s expenditure was a contingent appropriation, to prosecute an anticipated war with Great Britain on the Maine boundary question.  Few words will settle this.  First, that the ten millions appropriated was not made till 1839, and consequently could not have been expended in 1838; second, although it was appropriated, it has never been expended at all.  Those who heard Mr. Douglas recollect that he indulged himself in a contemptuous expression of pity for me.  “Now he’s got me,” thought I. But when he went on to say that five millions of the expenditure of 1838 were payments of the French indemnities, which I knew to be untrue; that five millions had been for the post-office, which I knew to be untrue; that ten millions had been for the Maine boundary war, which I not only knew to be untrue, but supremely ridiculous also; and when I saw that he was stupid enough to hope that I would permit such groundless and audacious assertions to go unexposed,—­I readily consented that, on the score both of veracity and sagacity, the audience should judge whether he or I were the more deserving of the world’s contempt.