Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/211

Rh veston Railroad Company vs. the United States, and the Burlington and Missouri Railroad Company vs. the United States, I do not believe the Court in those cases intended to establish a different doctrine.

This is as direct and strong an endorsement of Attorney-General Devens's opinion as can possibly be imagined. Justice Miller, who is certainly a member in good standing of the legal profession, if he “chanced to read” that opinion, evidently was not “surprised” at it but simply agreed with it; and so he tells me that I was mistaken as to the import of the Leavenworth, Lawrence and Galveston decision in giving the instructions above quoted, and that the Attorney-General was right in overruling them, and that you are very wide of the mark in anticipating a unanimous verdict of the legal profession against the latter.

And this case, in which the Interior Department had to yield to legal authority, which it did very reluctantly, is the identical case which you in your article call a “shameful prostitution of the Land department.”

However, even this flight of fanciful eloquence does not fill the measure of your ambition. You go on to say (page 248):

But the most remarkable fact remains to be stated. The Land department having procured the opinion of the Attorney-General justifying this wholesale plunder of the public domain is still not satisfied. The opinion, it should be remembered, follows the decision of the Supreme Court as to the specific case of reserved lands. It admits that for them no indemnity can be allowed. But the Department disregards this opinion in the interest of the railroads when it becomes an obstacle to their purposes. I understand that the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fé road has been allowed an illegal excess of indemnity for lands reserved at the date of its grant, amounting to about 800,000 acres, according to the principle