Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/312

278 3. You say it is not true that when Mr. Blaine read the Mulligan letters in the House the order in which he read them tended to create the least difficulty in understanding them. What is the fact? He read those of October 4th first, and then one of July 2d, and then the one of June 29th, which contained the “deadhead” and the “channels of usefulness,” thus just reversing the order of time and connection. Did he put the cart before the horse to make the thing intelligible?

4. You say that the charge of falsehood as to Mr. Blaine's solemn declaration before the House that the Little Rock road derived all its value from the State of Arkansas, and not from Congress, is unfounded. What are the facts? That Mr. Blaine made that statement with reference, to use his own words, “to the question of propriety involved in a Member of Congress holding an investment of this kind,” you cannot deny. The object of the statement confessedly was to convey the impression that the House, over which Speaker Blaine presided, had no power over that land-grant road or its interests and values, and that his owning or his asking for an interest in it while he was Speaker was a proper and harmless thing. Now, Mr. Blaine knew perfectly well that the original grants were made nominally to States, but really for specific lines. So in this case. The original Act of February, 1853, granted land to Arkansas and Mississippi “to aid in the construction of a railroad from a point upon the Mississippi river opposite the mouth of the Ohio river, via Little Rock, to the Texas boundary, near Fulton, in Arkansas, with branches to Fort Smith and the Mississippi river.” Mr. Blaine knew further that the very bill referred to in his two letters of October 4th, by promoting the passage of which he had done Mr. Caldwell “a great favor,” was “an act to extend the time for the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railway Company to complete