nd there was much suffering among the planters. Coming
upon the heel of the session, the Whig members of the legislature looked
upon the message as a surprise, and rather regarded it as a shrewd
political stroke. Mr. Toombs was equal to the emergency. He quickly put
in a resolution asking the Governor himself to suggest some means of
popular relief--throwing the burden of the problem back upon the
executive. But Governor McDonald was armed. He drew his last weapon from
his arsenal, and used it with formidable power. He sent in an elaborate
message to the houses recommending that the State make a large loan and
deposit the proceeds in bank, to be given out to the people on good
security. The Senate committee, in evident sympathy with the scheme for
relief, reported a bill authorizing the issue of two million six-year
eight-per-cent. bonds to be loaned to private citizens, limiting each
loan to one thousand dollars, and restricting the notes to three years,
with eight per cent. interest.

The report of the House Committee was prepared by Robert Toombs. It was
the most admirable and statesmanlike document of that day. Mr. Toombs
said that deliberation had resulted in the conviction that the measure
suggested by His Excellency should not be adopted. While his committee
was duly sensible of and deeply regretted the pecuniary embarrassment of
many of their fellow-citizens, he felt constrained by a sense of public
duty to declare that he deemed it unwise and impolitic to use the
credit, and pledge the property and labor of the whole people, to supply
the private wants of a portion only of the people. The use of the public
credit, he went on to say, was one of the most important and delicate
powers which a free people could confide in their representatives; it
should be jealously guarded, sacredly protected, and cautiously used,
even for the attainment of the noblest patriotic ends, and never for the
benefit of one class of the community to the exclusion or injury of the
rest, whether the demand grew out of real or supposed pecuniary
difficulties. To relieve these difficulties by use of the public credit
would be to substitute a public calamity for private misfortune, and
would end in the certain necessity of imposing grievous burdens in the
way of taxes upon the many for the benefit of the few. All experience,
Mr. Toombs went on to declare, admonish us to expect such results from
the proposed relief measures, to adopt which wou