The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-04-16

"HE following from a leading and
 unusually well-informed newspaper
 ! from the eastern section of the re- public is mingled with truth and error:
 John G. Carlisle was 46 when he took the gayel in the Forty-sixth Congress. He had won his spurs by course of cold reason in the ranks of the minority. He had studied the silver question, and was regarded as the ablest man championing the silver cause. He had studied the tar
 if question and was accepted as an au- thority on the revenue tariff idea. He was a scorching disputant. but always fair and deferential. His opponents whether in his own party or the other, never feared trick of any kind from him as respected figures of speech or any oth- CT kind of figures. It is true his early silver record arose at least to plague him, but he wrangled with his critics on the basis of their own quotations from his deliverances.'
 MT Carlisle won his spurs' in the ranks of the majority, not in the minority. In 1877 he entered the national councils as a member of the Forty-fifth Congress that had a pronounced democratic ma- jority, Samuel J. Randall the speaker, and Carlisle won his spurs at the very beginning when he spoke to the constitu- tionaI question involved in the then re- ublican idea of the employment of the United States army as a police force at the polls in the states. From that day he was the first constitutional lawyer and cfo the American Congress.
 MT. Carlisle had not Studied the sil- yer question:" and was never the "cham- pion of the silver cause.' On the con trary he distrusted the idea of Bland, and agreed with the idea of Jefferson that the true ratio between the two metals was that fixed by the market, the only economic proposition as to which Jener- soh and Hamilton were agreed He never made but one speech on the silver question while in Congress, and that was to convince the House of Representatives that the limited coinage of the Bland Allison bill. that provided s2,0O0,000 month, was better than unlimited and free coinage at 16 to i.
 That was the speech that was garbled in 1896, and they who did it misled in that meanest way that 'twickedness can be perpetrated-by suppressing the truth. defy anybody to show a single utterance of John G. Carlisle in favor of 16 to as advocated by Richard P. Bland. On the contrary, the entire six years he was speaker, he packed the committee on con- age, weights and measures against 16 to 1. just as he packed the committee on education against the Blair educational bill The fact is it was John G. Carlisle and not Grover Cleveland who killed 16 to 1.
 know that in 1877 or 1878, his first Congress, MT. Carlisle voted for the Bland bill, but he did 1t under pro- test and as perfunctory act of party discipline That bill passed both tn Q democratic House and the republican Senate and was vetoed by R. B. Hayes. The outcome was the compromise Bland-Allison limited coinage on gov ernment account of $2,000,000 monthly. Mr. Carlisle advocated that bill, as I said before, and championed 1t against Bland himself and those who thought as Bland did. It is also true that in his single speech in Congress on coin age Mir Carlisle denounced the dem onetization of silver by certAln gov ernlnents in Europe as a crime lliat had wrought more havoc and more misery than war or pestilence, but he also held that only by international