to an inflated currency than it had been twenty years before, and manufacturers and industrialists were much more decisive in their demand for a gold standard. From members of the Indiana House delegation, Voorhees found an intense desire that he do nothing to risk their own political futures, as any blockage of the repeal bill would be sure to do. Finally, the senator had to reckon with the other big issue pending, on which he and the president would have to part company: tariff reduction. Realizing that he would have to pick his fights, and sweetened with great dollops of patronage by the Administration, Voorhees agreed to carry the repeal bill through, and he kept absolute faith. In late October, when a compromise was proposed that would delay the silver purchase act's repeal until July 1, 1894, thirty seven of the forty-four Democratic senators signed a letter endorsing it. Voorhees's name was not among them. He refused to consider any halfway measures, and saw to it that unconditional repeal went through within the month. Vooorhees delivered his last speech in the Senate in January 1896, a plea on behalf of silver coinage and denouncing the tariff protectionists and centralizers of government power. He meant it as something of a valedictory. His health was in steep decline, and in any case the Indiana legislature had gone heavily Republican, and Democrats' chance of regaining it that fall were slim. The following winter, when the lawmakers assembled, Voorhees was replaced with a Republican, though every Democratic vote went for him. Retirement and death Voorhees returned to Indiana, preparing lectures that he intended to deliver on the lyceum circuit, should his health permit, and writing a memoir, "The Public Men of My Times," that he hoped would be completed and would sell, as General Grant's memoirs did; without it, he would be leaving his daughter with no estate at all. Only three sections of it were completed before his death in Washington, D.C., in April 1897 at the age of 69. His generosity or profligacy was such that his estate could not even afford his funeral expenses. Bibliography Stampp, Kenneth M. Indiana Politics during the Civil War (1949) Voorhees, Daniel. Forty Years of Oratory (2 vols., Indianapolis, Indiana, 1898), edited by his three sons and his daughter, Harriet C. Voorhees, and with a biographical sketch by T. B. Long. See also Daniel W. Voorhees