Daily Kennebec journal. [microfilm reel] (Augusta, Me.) 1870-1975, 1873-09-26
THE PRESIDENTS POLICY.

| From the Y. Y. Journal of Commerce, Sept, %.
On the lists of persons who called upon the
President during his brief stay in town, to Of
fer advice, we do not find the names of our
leading merchants. Those who surrounded
the President from first to last were bankers,
inanciers and stock spectators. Among
them were men Of experience and judgment,
and in ordinary circumstances qualified to
give impartial and excellent counsel; but
they were not disinterested advisers, and they
were not cool. :. We feel sure that from no
body Of merchants, at this stage of the diff
Guilty, would have emanated the proposition
TO issue $35, 00O 900 of the $44 ,000, 900 in re-
serve to the banks, and take any securities
they might offer for the money. That is a
very radical, desperate measure, for which we
find no warrant in the Constitution or the
laws. In fact those who counselled it, admit
ted that it could be sanctioned only by that
necessity which knows no law. To ask for
it, then, was to ask for violation of law to
insufferably beset with demands to do this;
but he resisted with great firmness. That it
was confessedly illegal was all he cared to
know, and on that position he planted HIM
self like a rock, and stood unmoved in all the
angry swirl of clamor that roared about him.
1t required great decision of character and
steadiness of nerve to refuse the solicitation
of many who were of the Presidents best per-
sonal friends; but he did SO, and the country
will thank him for it, That the proposed
measure is illegal would suffice for its rejec
ton; but beyond this there are doubts
whether it would do more than temporary
good, and that chiefly to the specializing class.
1t would most likely make buoyant stock
market. 1t is just what the bulls want. But
its effect would only be for time. With the
recall of these extraordinary loans from the
they must be recalled some time
would come another tumble. And then the
government would be called on to interfere
again llegally-followiDg the precedent it
would do so; and SO the cOnsummate folly of
speculation would be directly encouraged by
the government itself, and the end Of such a
system of alternate commissions and quack
remedies would be the prostration of the
whole country. The arrangement of the ma
tional fnancies consequent upon the adoption
of such system would interfere with bust
ness universally. Now it is only the specu-
lators who are injuriously affected. Then it
would be everybody in every kind of business.
There is another and even more serious as
pect of this great question. If Casarism in
America is ever to be more than newspaper
chatter and bugbear, if it is even to take a
real step towards actually, look out for that
stride in the direction of over-regulating the
business of the country What the finan-
ciers asked President Grant to do, is that
which the Caesars are always ready to do. 1t
is the paternal theory of imperial govern
ments to be interfering in the business con-
Germs of the people, and regulating every
thing down to the price of bread and beer. If
President Grant had yielded to the urgency
of his advisers, he would have been for the
moment a Caesar. He would have realized
Government.
such as that of Russia, where the only will is
that Of the Car. That the President resisted
the temptation to stretch the executive au
thority at this time is one of the best pieces of
evidence we have yet seen that he does not
mediate the Casarism attributed to him by
some Of the papers. BY his firmness he may
have lost for the present the applause of specu
lating people, who think that the Treasury of
the United States ought to be empted to save
them from failure; but he will surely receive
the approval of calm, judicious men, who be-
lieve in the supremacy of law. The policy
adopted by the government was the best prac-
ticable in the actual condition of things