The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1869-09-15
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER Is, 1869.
oENDLETONs SPEECH At CLIFTON.

PENDLETONS SPEECH At CLIFTON.
TIE repudiationists of the United States have
been so terribly defeated in their efforts to
Undue the American people with the spirit of
dishonesty, that their leaders are deeply i'm
pressed with the necessity of concealing or
Disgusting their ultra views. A remarkable
instance of this feeling is afforded by the late
speech of George H. Pendleton, the Demo-
cratic candidate for Governor of Ohio, at
Clifton. He is the ostensible head of the
reputation ring of the Democratic party.
His supporters at the Tammany Convention,
in 1868, gloried in calling him ''young green
backs, and in urging his claims to Presiden-
tial honors on the ground that he would wipe
away the debt by an unlimited issue of legal
tenders. He was zealously eulogized by
Brick Pomeroy in the same columns which
teemed with denunciations of bondholders
aud avowals of determination to make the
national bonds as worthless as autumn leaves.
ven now his leading Ohio organ, the Gin
,innati Enquirer, openly advocates repudia-
ton, if the Pendleton plan of paying the
debt does not prevail. And yet gentleman
George, in addressing party of his friends
evidently intended as campaign document,
carefully abstains from giving prominence to
the theories with which he is so thoroughly
identified. While he bids his irresponsible
Journals to win votes from those who are lost
to all sense of honor by vain promises of re-
lief from the burdens of taxation, he adj
dresses himself to the more difficult task of
making favorable impression upon the re-
presentatives of the business interests of the
country. 1t is astonishing how deeply he
sympathizes with them; how sorry he is that
the bonds are not made to bear their proper
tionate share of taxation; how much he is
grieved by contraction and commercial
failures; how deeply he regrets the decline in
prices which men of all parties have
been praying for, and how jesuitically
he suggests the sham remedy which he is
afraid and ashamed to prescribe to a business
audience. With all his fne-spun theories
Mr.. Pendleton forgets that the only way to
pay debt is to pay it. 1t is much easier to
discharge an old obligation by giving anew
one than by planking down the hard cash;
and the sum and substance of the philosophy
of the Ohio statesman is founded on this
promises to pay redeemable with nothing
more substantial than new promises, is but
another name for repudiation And when
Mr.. Pendleton promises this remedy, even
in disguised shape, to business audience,
they well ask whether the nation can afford
it? Grievous as the burdens of the debt may
be- the loss entailed by the total destruction
of confidence, the humiliation of public and
private credit, and the downfall of the existing
financial system, would be ten times more
grievous. All past panics in the United
States would be periods of prosperity COM
pared with the terrific crash which Pendleton
invites. The candidate whose place on the
Democratic ticket he assumed, Gen. Rose
Grams, justly declared that the true way to
diminish the burdens of the debt was to i'm
prove the national credit. The agitations of
the repudiators have already cost the nation
many millions of dollars of additional interest,
and if their candidates are not defeated MANY =
millions more will be necessarily added to the
burdens of taxation. Financiers of the Pendle
ton school are, in fact, only one degree less
expensive and injurious to the national inte-
rests than the secessionists with whom they
oymphtuiZouuuiilB eio hd. lney eJne cnlel
obstacles to negotiation of new loans bear
ing one-third less interest than those now il
existence, and requiring one.third less taxa
tion to defray their annual burden. AnC
while their mere clamors work this mischief
the official establishment of their theorie
would be scarcely less mischievous than tn
success of the Rebellion. The loss suffere
by the bondholders would form but 1.-THE O
the misery and suffering they would infic
upon all the toilers of the land by the pre-
tracted arrangement of every form of busi
ness, the cessation of many important pun
suits, the enforced idleness of millions G
workmen, and the pressure of want and stal
walton upon myriads of helpless families.