Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/225

Rh to indemnity lands, the same instructions spoken of above; and then when I decided that the unsold lands of six land-grant railroads should be thrown open to settlement at the Government price. In the first case I was overruled by the Attorney-General, whose opinion was subsequently indorsed by Justice Miller's decision, and in the second case I was overruled by the Supreme Court. In both cases I had set aside the policy sustained by my predecessors, and in both cases superior authority ruled that I had gone beyond the intent of the law, not in favor of, but against the interests of the railroads. When, in my first letter to you, I mentioned that second decision of mine which threw open to the settler many millions of acres—indeed, so vast a quantity of land that all the land involved in the indemnity controversies about which you throw up so much dust appears as a miserable pittance in comparison to it—your genius rose to its most brilliant effort to make out that even in this case I was governed by railroad influence. You called my whole proceeding “clap-trap,” and then arraigned me as a traitor to the interests of the American people—for what? For submitting to a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, which affirmed that the lands in question, although unsold, were “disposed of” by mortgages, and could therefore not be thrown open to settlement as I had directed, thus setting aside my ruling point-blank, in the clearest language, without the remotest possibility of a question as to its meaning. Your accusation in this case is so unique that it can not be explained by any ordinary mental process. One might be inclined to feel your pulse, were there not another explanation. But there is.

I showed in my first letter that in this case the railroads concerned were saved by the loose wording of the granting acts, and that these acts were framed and passed when you were a member of the House of Representatives and a