he Forty-fifth Congress, chosen with Hayes in
1876, and the Forty-sixth, in 1878, were Democratic, and delighted to
embarrass the Administration. Dissatisfied Republicans saw the deadlock
and laid it upon the shoulders of the President. The Democratic Congress
checked Administration measures, and managed to advance opposition
measures of its own. Twice Hayes had to summon special sessions because
of the failure of appropriation bills, and in his first winter the
opposition endangered those policies of finance to which the Republican
party had become pledged.

The Greenback agitation, rising about 1868 and stimulated by the panic
of 1873, had not subsided when Hayes became President. It had lost much
of its force, but there continued throughout the West, in both parties,
a spirit that encouraged inflation of every sort. In Congress there were
repeated efforts to repeal the Resumption Act of 1875, which the
Democratic platform had denounced the next year. And when a sudden
increase in the production of silver reduced its price, a silver
inflation movement was placed beside the Greenback movement.

The United States had used almost no silver coin between 1834 and 1862
because the coinage ratio, sixteen to one, undervalued silver and made
it wasteful to coin it. No specie was used as currency between 1862 and
1879, and the relative market prices of bullion remained close to their
usual average until the year of panic. During the seventies the price of
silver fell as new mines were opened in the West. The ratio rose above
sixteen to one, and silver, from being undervalued at that ratio, came
to be overvalued. It would now have paid owners of silver bullion to
coin it into dollars at the legal rate, but Congress had in 1873, after
a generation of disuse of silver, dropped the silver dollar from the
list of standard coins. As silver fell in value, mine-owners asked for a
renewal of coinage, and inflationists joined them, hoping for more money
of any kind. During the winter of 1878 a free silver coinage bill,
passed by the Democratic House under the guidance of Richard P. Bland,
of Missouri, was under consideration in the Republican Senate.

John Sherman, the defender of gold resumption, was no longer in the
Senate to fight this Bland Act. He had become Hayes's Secretary of the
Treasury, and in this capacity was working toward resumption and
upholding Hayes in his war on the spoilsmen. In his place, Allison, of
Iowa, forced a