2 am in any way responsible for its offensive provisions depends upon what efforts I made or failed to make to prevent their adoption. That it may be clearly understood what I did on this subject, I will briefly state the facts. As chairman of the Committee on Appropriations it was my duty to see that the annual appropriation bills were acted upon in the House before the Forty-Second Congress expired. To do this it was necessary to press them constantly and to the exclusion of a great mass of other business. For this purpose chiefly the House was in session from ten to fifteen hours in each twenty-four during the last week of the term. I had special charge of the legislative appropriation bill, upon the preparation of which my committee had spent nearly two weeks of labor before the meeting of Congress. It was the most important of the twelve annual bills. Its provisions reached every part of the machinery of the Government in all the States and Territories of the Union. The amount appropriated by it was oneseventh of the total annual expenditures of the Government, exclusive of the interest on the public debt. It contained all the appropriations required by law for the legislative department of the Government; for the public printing and binding; for the President and the officers and employes at the Executive Mansion ; for the seven executive departments at Washington, and all their bureaus and subdivisions ; for the sub-treasuries and public depositaries in fourteen cities of the Union ; for all the officers and agents employed in the assessment and collection of the internal revenue ; for the governments of the nine Territories and of the District of Columbia ; for the mints and the assay offices ; for the land offices and the surveys of public lands ; and for all the courts, judges, district attorneys, and marshals of the United States. Besides this, during its progress through the two Houses, many provisions had been added to the bill wffiich were considered of vital importance to the public interests. A section had been added in the Senate to force the Pacific railroad companies to pay the arrears of interest on the bonds loaned to them by the United States, and to commence refunding the principal. An investigating committee of the House had unearthed enormous frauds committed by and against these companies, and as the result of two months’ labor had framed a bill of several sections to provide for bringing suits in the courts to recover the vast sums of which the ro&d and Government had been plundered, and to prevent further spoliation. That bill had also been made a part of the appropriation bill. While the bill was first passing through the House, repeated efforts were made to increase the salaries of different officers of the Government; in every instance I resisted these efforts, and but little increase was made until forty-eight hours before the Congress expired, when the House loaded upon this bill an amend-
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