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310 Missouri, being the Democratic nominees. Virginia and Mississippi had not been fully reconstructed, and so were not yet permitted to vote. They have squared the matter up since, however, by voting with great enthusiasm.

In 1869 the Pacific Railroad was completed, whereby the trip from the Atlantic to the Pacific three thousand and three hundred miles might be made in a week. It also attracted the Asiatic trade, and tea, silk, spices, and leprosy found a new market in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Still flushed with its success in humorous legislation, Congress, on the 30th of March, 1870, passed the Fifteenth Amendment, giving to the colored men the right to vote. It then became a part of the Constitution, and people who have seen it there speak very highly of it.

Prosperity now attracted no attention whatever. Gold, worth nearly three dollars at the close of the war, fell to a dollar and ten cents, and the debt during the first two years of this administration was reduced two hundred million dollars.

Genuine peace reigned in the entire Republic, and o'er the scarred and shell-torn fields of the South there waved, in place of hostile banners, once more the cotton and the corn. The red foliage of the gum-tree with the white in the snowy white cotton-fields and the blue-grass of