lamb. To do less would be more than cruel, it would be murderous;--the
agency which created the condition was bound by all law and precedent
to see that those conditions were maintained in their entirety. It
could not evade the issue except at the expense of dignity,
consistency and humanity. There was but one honorable course to
pursue. Any other would be a horrible abandonment of principle. If it
were powerful to create, to make free men and citizens, it must,
manifestly, be powerful to insure the enjoyment of the freedom
conferred, and protect the inviolability of the franchise granted. Any
other conclusion would make government a by-word and a scoffing to the
nations; any other conclusion would make its conferring of freedom and
citizenship absurd in the extreme, a mere trick of the demagogue to
ease the popular conscience. To do such a thing would sink a decent
government lower in the estimation of the world than the miserable
apology of government represented by the Khedive of Egypt.

No patriotic American would admit to himself, or to a foreigner, that
the United States Government, through its accredited representatives
in Congress, possessed constitutional power to confer a benefit and
did not possess power to make that benefit available; to contract an
obligation, pecuniary or other, which it had not inherent power to
liquidate. The validity of a contract, as a matter of fact, depends
upon the ability of the parties to enter into it, for no court can
enforce a contract when it is shown that the principals to it had not
legal right to make it or to fulfill the conditions of it. It is
accepted as a surety of power to observe the conditions when a
sovereign government makes itself a party to a contract. The people
are bound by their agents, to whom they delegate authority. Nothing is
regarded in a more obnoxious light than the repudiation of their
honest debts by sovereign States. It is regarded in financial circles