Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/224

190 your general allegation “related to the general administration of the Land department during a long series of years.” And you significantly add: “If you made any such decisions (adverse to the railroads) I had nothing to do with them; my task was to show that for nearly a third of a century the Land department to a very great extent has been the servant of the railways and not the people.” This is a highly characteristic admission. It was, then, not your “task” to speak the truth, but to make a case by suppressing the truth. When a decision was made in favor of a railroad, no matter whether it was ever so just, you adduce it as proof that the railroads controlled the Land department. When three times as many decisions were made in favor of the settlers against the railroads you had “nothing to do with them.” This kind of suppression of the truth is a simple falsification of facts. Your self-imposed “task” was, therefore, that of a falsifier, convicted as such by your own statement.

The same recklessness appears in your assertion that five or six of the Department decisions under my administration have been overruled by my successors. I have inquired into that matter, and am informed by very competent authority that this is true only of one, the decision in the Gates case. This would demonstrate the rather remarkable fact that, although I have been out of office for two years, but one of the hundreds of decisions made during the four years of my administration has by my successor been set aside. I might almost thank you for the opportunity you give me of showing an infallibility on my part and that of my legal advisers which I should have hesitated to claim. The same might be said if there were six such cases instead of one.

But, to tell the exact truth, I have been overruled in two other instances: once when I had issued instructions to the General Land Office restricting the claims of the railroads