Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/591

Rh "'I am also satisfied that if our case should come before you, that we shall have both law and justice rendered to us, so far as it is dependent upon your decision.'"

Thus writes the client to his lawyer who had been made judge, and who is congratulated on the justice with which he will decide the case in which he had been counsel.

It may well be imagined v/hat influences this conspiracy must have possessed itself of and wielded for evil, when it is seen how a memorialist who dared to ask for the impeachment of Judge Watrous has been hunted, traduced, and threatened, to deter him from the prosecution of his remedy before Congress. Leading presses have been subsidized to devote their columns to his abuse, and to the circulation of absurd slanders. Great influences must certainly have been employed to procure this wholesale and unqualified personal abuse, when we reflect upon the indorsements Mr. Mussina has received with respect to the truth and justice of his complaints. The assertion of his wrongs has been sustained by the unanimous report of one committee of Congress; the findings of this committee have again been indorsed by a moiety of the present House Judiciary Committee, and those of this committee who dissented have been willing to admit that they had not examined the charges assigned by Mussina with care. With such indorsements of his verity, and the fact being considered, too, that the judge he accuses had been previously charged by the sovereign State itself, what influences may we not imagine to have been employed to so pervert the truth?

In the history I have stated of the conspiracies, collusions, and frauds in which Judge Watrous was an active party, I have not attempted to comprehend all the malfeasances of the judge. The record of these might be greatly extended. But I have only intended to give a sketch of the most prominent and notorious of his misdeeds. In doing this I think I may claim that I have not indulged in mere assertions, nor in any statements, unless sustained and accompanied by the evidence. I think that I have not commented with violence upon any of the revelations of the judge's offenses. I have had no disposition to indulge in denunciations, and I have sought only to marshal the facts for the calm consideration and judgment of this honorable body. With respect to the malfeasance of the judge in the cases of Mussina and Spencer, I have been governed in my statements by the letter of the testimony taken by the House committee in the investigation of his conduct. I have followed this testimony strictly, I believe, and with no other anxiety than that of arriving at those legitimate conclusions of fact which it inevitably leads to and warrants.

In drawing to a close the brief history I have attempted to narrate of the frauds which were conceived, set on foot, and promoted by Judge Watrous and his confederates, a portion of whom, at least, are known, it will be well to make a slight review of the principal facts, so as to hold clearly in the mind correct and proportionate ideas of the vast conspiracy, of the details of which I have spoken at length.

It appears that the company was organized on a scale of most extraordinary extent; and that its ramifications, as far as known, reached from State to State, to the most distant points of the Union, and that, as far as they