by day and year by year,
since the first day Mr. Cleveland entered the presidential chair.
What did he do with that surplus revenue? He did not make proclamation
of it for two or three years, but let it accumulate and accumulate
until he did not know what to do with it. Finally the attention
of the administration was called to the fact that they ought to
buy bonds with it. Well, Mr. Cleveland, with his sharp construction,
thought he had not the power to buy bonds; he thought he could not
do it legally. The law confers the power upon the Secretary of
the Treasury.

"The President had no more power over it than the Senator from
Connecticut before me [Mr. Platt] has. The law confers it upon
the secretary; it was his duty to buy bonds. What untold sums have
been lost by his failure to comply with that law. Until recently,
during nearly all the administration of Mr. Cleveland, the four
per cent. bonds have been sold in the market about 123. I have
here the American almanac giving the value of the four per cent.
bonds during his administration, and they have usually sold at 123.
If the United States had quietly watched its opportunities in the
way the present secretary's predecessors had done, he could have
gone into the market and absorbed those bonds, to the amount of
half a million or a million at a time, and bought them at the market
price, 123, and then how much money would have been saved to the
government of the United States.

"My former colleague says they have over $100,000,000 of surplus.
If they had applied that one hundred million in the purchase of
bonds they would have saved four per cent. per annum for three
years--that is, twelve per cent. And besides, they would have
saved six or seven per cent. lost by the advance of bonds. At any
time during the administration of Mr. Cleveland, if his Secretary
of the Treasury had exercised the power conferred on him by the
law, he might have saved the government of the United States from
twelve to sixteen per cent. on the whole hundred million of dollars,
if he had invested it in bonds of the United States. But he would
not do it because he had not the power. So the President sent to
Congress and asked for power, just as he has done in this case,
when he had ample power, and both Houses declared unanimously that
he had the power, and then, after the bonds had gone up to 127 or
128, when he had lost three years' interest on a large portion of
this accumula