Page:Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs (Volume Two).djvu/18

Rh flag of the United States, reinforcements and provisions to one of them. The very boundaries of right and wrong seem obliterated when we see a Cabinet minister engaged for months in deliberately changing the distribution of public arms to places in the hands of those about to resist the public authority, so as to place within their grasp means of waging war against the United States greater than they ever used against a foreign foe; and another Cabinet minister, still holding his commission under the authority of the United States, still a confidential adviser of the President, still bound by his oath to support the Constitution of the United States, himself a commissioner from his own State to another of the United States for the purpose of organizing and extending another part of the same great scheme of rebellion; and the doom of the Republic seems sealed when the President, surrounded by such ministers, permits, without rebuke, the Government to be betrayed, neglects the solemn warning of the first soldier of the age, till almost every fort is a prey to domestic treason, and accepts assurances of peace in his time at the expense of leaving the national honor unguarded. His message gives aid and comfort to the enemies of the Union, by avowing his inability to maintain its integrity; and, paralyzed and stupefied, he stands amid the crash of the falling Republic, still muttering, ‘Not in my time, not in my time; after me the deluge!

Soon after Mr. Colfax’s election as speaker of the Thirty-eighth Congress, I met him in a restaurant. He expressed surprise that he had not heard from me in regard to a place upon a committee. I said that the subject did not occupy my thoughts—that I had work enough whether I was upon a committee or not. He expressed himself as disturbed by the fact that he could not give me as good a place as he wished to give me. I tried to relieve his mind upon that point. In all my legislative experience I never made any