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Mr. BROWN. Will the Senator allow me to ask him a question?

Mr. BUTLER. Yes, sir.

Mr. BROWN. I will ask him whether he did not vote for the bounty land bill?

Mr. BUTLER. What bounty land bill?

Mr. BROWN. The bill making grant of land to soldiers in the war of 1812.

Mr. BUTLER. I have never heard of the bill. It has not come up so far as I know. -Laughter.-

Mr. BROWN. Many of the Senator's constituents have got land under it, whether he has heard of it or not. I refer to the bill of 1847, granting bounty land to the soldiers in the war of 1812, and the Indian wars.

My object in asking the Senator the question was this: When we passed that bill we certainly did not propose to pay a debt that the Government owed. The soldiers who had performed the services had been fully paid off and discharged long before. Thirty years after they had performed the services, Congress paid what the Senators and Representatives chose to regard as a debt of gratitude, simply, by voting them a bounty in land. It was scarcely a bounty, for it was not as an inducement to the soldier to go to war; it was not given to him in consideration of anything he had done, but as a mere naked gratuity on the part of the Government, in the discharge of what is regarded as a sort of debt of gratitude. Now, if we could appropriate lands to pay a debt of gratitude, why can we not appropriate them to purpose of benevolence as this bill proposes to do? If you can give to a soldier one hundred and sixty acres of land, when you owed him nothing, when you had paid him and discharged him, and he had been pursuing his own business thirty years, why can you not give a little land for the benefit of the insane? In other words, if you can appropriate land without a consideration to people capable of taking care of themselves, and having all the senses with which God has endowed them, why can you not appropriate a little in the same way to people who have not their natural senses, whose minds are perfect blanks?

Mr. BUTLER. I understand the hour has arrived for the consideration of the special order, but I will reply to my honorable friend now. I did not expect to have this episode, but I will reply.

Mr. HUNTER. I hope the Senator will permit the special order to be called up, and he can go on tomorrow morning.

Mr. BUTLER. I always like to reply to an interrogatory right off. I have always understood that the soldiers employed by the United States, as those connected with the Government of the United States, as the agents of the United States, should be rewarded by the Government, as all nations do in relation to their own officers. The militia of each State are not the soldiers of the United States. All Governments have a pension list. This was but a pension list in a new form; it is a pension list bestowing upon the soldier who encountered the perils of battle and left his home to fight for the rights of his country, a pension. And it its one of those things which enter into the system of every country which employs soldiers to conduct its operations of war. The soldiers of 1812 were not the officers of South Carolina, of North Carolina, or of Virginia. Their services were referable to a different authority -- the authority of the United Staten. And allow me to say upon that subject, though I might have originally had doubts, I am one of those who, instead of erecting monuments, piling up stones of marble, and writing upon them splendid inscriptions of the nation's gratitude, prefer, when soldiers and sailors encounter dangers and perform duties upon the battlefield, to make them living monuments of my gratitude and magnanimity.

Mr. BROWN. That is all well enough.

Mr. DOUGLAS. I move to postpone the further consideration of the bill until tomorrow, so that the Senate may proceed to the consideration of the special order.

Mr. FOOT. I hope the Senate will take a vote on the bill.

Mr. HUNTER. I hope the special order will be taken up, because I have a word or two further to say upon this bill.

Mr. JONES, of Iowa. As the hour has arrived for the consideration of the special order, is not this bill postponed as a matter of course?

The PRESIDENT. As it is under consideration, it must be disposed of by a vote of the Senate.

The motion to postpone was agreed to.