Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/428

408 undertook in a conspicuous place to denounce the abuses of the Government and to bring about their correction. You have heard, perhaps, of certain debates in Congress last winter which greatly disturbed the equanimity of the party managers. Flagrant wrongs in the New York customhouse were revealed and an investigation insisted upon. What happened? The men who denounced the abuse were vilified as enemies and traitors to the Republican party. But the voice of the people made itself heard, and after much maneuvering and wrangling the Administration leaders perceived that to refuse an investigation would be dangerous, and it was granted. But not one of the men who denounced the evils was put on the committee. The investigation was made. A mass of testimony put the existence of those evils beyond a doubt. The efforts of members who virtually constituted themselves the attorneys of those in power were in vain. The truth could not be entirely smothered. It was clearly and beyond cavil established that bribery and corruption had prevailed on a large scale; that the customhouse, with its legion of officers, had in the most unscrupulous and tyrannical way been used as a machinery to control the politics of the State, and this in the name of the President, that a most scandalous practice called the general-order business, by which the mercantile community was mercilessly plundered, and which had been previously denounced by the merchants, by Congressional committees and by officers of the Treasury Department itself, was still in full operation, and that the person most benefited by it was one of the favorites of the President, and, having acquired this source of unrighteous gain on the strength of a general introduction written by the President himself, maintained his position with mysterious power and a most singular success against all efforts to correct the evil. All this the testimony made