righteous demands of
constitutional government, ploughshares rusted in the neglected
fields, workshops looked to alien lands for toilers, while patriots
answered the bugle-call, and a nation was freed from an eating cancer.
But what was the return for such sacrifices? Surely, if ever were
soldiers entitled to fair and full reward, it was those who responded
to the repeated call of Lincoln for aid in suppressing the most
gigantic rebellion of history--not in the form of driblets of charity,
doled with cunning arts to secure their submission to extortions, not
offered as a bribe to unblushing perjury and denied to honest
suffering, but simple and exact justice, involving a full performance
of national obligation in return for the stipulated discharge of the
duty of citizenship. The simple statement of facts of history will
serve to expose the methods of those who pose as _par excellence_ the
soldiers' friends and the defenders of national faith.

The soldiers who enlisted in the war of the rebellion were promised by
the government, in addition to varying bounties, a stipulated sum of
money per month. It requires no argument to prove that the faith of
the government was as much pledged to the citizen who risked his life,
as to him who merely risked a portion of his wealth in a secured loan
to the government. But the record shows that the pay of the former was
reduced by nearly sixty per cent, while the returns of the latter were
doubled, trebled, and quadrupled; that in many cases government
obligations were closed by the erection of a cheap cast-iron tablet
over a dead hero, while the descendants of bondholders were guarded in
an undisturbed enjoyment of the fruits of their ancestors' greed. For,
after the armies were in the field, the same legislative enactment
that reduced the value of the soldier's pay increased that of the
creditor's bond, by providing that the money of the soldier should be
rapidly depreciated in value, while the interest upon bonds should be
payable in coin; and then, after the war was over, another and more
valuable bond was prepared, that should relieve the favored creditor
of all fear of losing his hold upon the treasury by the payment of his
debt. That the purpose of the lawmakers was deliberate, was exposed in
a speech by Senator Sherman, who was Chairman of the Finance Committee
of the Senate while the soldiers in the trenches were being robbed in
the interest of the creditors at home. In revi