State had been in office a comparatively brief
period when the discovery was made that he was a defaulter to the
amount of $315,612.19.[405] It would be a reflection upon Mr. Rhodes's
intelligence to assume that he was ignorant of this important fact.
Oh, no! he must have known about it, but to make any allusion to it
would be out of harmony with the purposes he evidently had in view. It
is safe to assume that, if the will of a majority of the legal voters
of the State had not been violently suppressed in the interest of
_good_ and _honest_ government, which would have resulted in the
election of honest George M. Buchanan, while the State would not have
been _redeemed_, it would have been saved from the loss of
$315,612.19. The writer of these lines has never believed that
Hemingway was the personal beneficiary of this money or any part
thereof, but that he was the instrument in the hands of others. Still
he was the official representative of the _redemption_ of the State
for which "all lovers of good government must rejoice."

That there was a material increase in the population and in the wealth
of the State will not be denied. These results would have followed,
even if the State had never been _redeemed_. They were not due to
_redemption_ but in spite of it. In fact, there was a marked increase
in population and in wealth before as well as subsequent to the
_redemption_. But when the author states that the bonded indebtedness
and taxation are low, the impression necessarily made, and intended to
be made upon the mind of the reader, is that after the _redemption_
took place and as a result thereof, the _rate_ of taxation was
reduced, the volume of money paid into the State treasury annually for
the support of the government was less than it had been before, and
that there had been a material reduction in the bonded debt of the
State, neither of which is true.[406] If Mr. Rhodes had been disposed
to record the truth and nothing but the truth, which is presumed to be
the aim of an impartial historian, he could have easily obtained the
facts, because they are matters of record. To give the reader an idea
of what the facts were and are, I will take, for purposes of
comparison, one year prior and one subsequent to the _redemption_ of
the State. In 1875, the year that the _redemption_ took place, the
assessed value of taxable property was $119,313,834. The receipts from
all sources that year amounted to $1,801,129.12. Disb