Construction and Reconstruction
Both parties made such recommendations but it was the Republican party that gave them practical effect. It was under Republican government, on July l, 1862, that the Pacific Railroad charters were actually issued, and it was under Republican government that bonds were issued to assist in the construction of the roads. The bonds issued aggregated $64,623,512 and they were practically all repaid to the government, with interest, between the years 1897 and 1899. The great steel highways which connect the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the continent are thus another memorial of the national services of the Republican party.
To save the Nation from dissolution, to make it a nation of free men, to give it a stable and secure banking and currency system, to give millions of its people free homesteads, to conserve and enlarge its natural resources, to provide generously for the most useful education, to provide it with continent-spanning transportation facilities and to give it the industrial primacy of the world; these were the things for which the Republican party stood, and these were the things which it achieved in its first administration of the Res Publica, the Commonwealth.
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