Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/131

Rh Next to plotting against the life of an Indian, you accuse me of not furnishing the correspondence upon the case of Big Snake asked for by the Senate, within ten months of the call. You say that “the Interior Department forgot for nearly a year to answer the inquiry.” I informed you officially on the 5th of January of this year that when the resolution of the Senate on the 12th of March, 1880, was delivered at this Department, it was forthwith referred to the Indian Office, with special directions for report; that by some accident the report did not take its regular way through the Interior Department to the Senate; that it is probable the late chief clerk of the Indian Office, Mr. Brooks, took it before your committee for the investigation of the Ponca case, rather in order to expedite than to delay it. This official statement, showing that the inquiry was not forgotten for ten months, should have been considered sufficient among gentlemen.

The circumstance of such an accidental delay would be treated as a very insignificant affair by any statesman of average size. After having received from a Cabinet Minister an explanation such as I gave, he would decently accept that explanation without further comment. But with this official statement before you, you repeated time and again in the course of your remarks, “that the Interior Department forgot for nearly ten months to answer the inquiry at all”; that I “had even forgotten that the inquiry had been made,” etc.

Since with characteristic zeal you thus insist upon magnifying so small an affair into importance, you will not object if I inquire into the candor and ingenuousness of your reasoning. I affirm that the inquiry was not forgotten, not only not for ten months, but not for a day. The question arises: Did you not know that it was not forgotten? The record of the session of the Senate Committee inquiring into the Ponca case, of which you are a