The identification and restoration of defaced and mutilated notes is a

very difficult and important operation. From the toes of stockings, in

which they have been washed and dissolved; from the stomachs of animals,

and even of men; from the bodies of drowned and murdered human beings;

from the holes of vice and of deadly disease, these fragments of money,

whose lines are often utterly obliterated, whose tissues emit the

foulest smells, come to the Treasury, and are committed wholly to the

supervision and skill of women.

Let any just mind decide whether such labor does not deserve to be

recognized and rewarded absolutely on its own merits. Such is its

acknowledged value, that these Government experts have been allowed to

go to distant parts of the country, to restore burnt money belonging to

Adams’ Express Company, because it was known that there was no one else

in the land, who could perform this service.

The whole basement floor of the north wing of the Treasury is occupied

by the busy counters of mutilated money. Here sit one hundred and eighty

women counters, restorers and detectors. Side by side, we see the faded

and the blooming face. Here is the woman, worn and weary—born, more than

likely, to ease and luxury—thankfully working to support herself and her

children; and at the very next table, a maiden, whose fresh youth, care

has not yet worn out—each working with equal thankfulness, to support

herself, and besides, perhaps, father and mother, brother, sister or

child.

[Illustration:

COUNTING WORN AND DEFACED GREENBACKS, AND DETECTING COUNTERFEITS.

This room is in the Redemption Bureau, Treasury Building. Over One

Hundred Thousand Dollars worth of Fractional Currency alone is here

daily received for redemption; out of which about $350 dollars’

worth of counterfeit money is detected, stamped and returned.

]

The time of toil, for one who must earn her living, is not long; indeed,

the hours are fewer than the average hours of ordinary labor. She does

not complain of them; she is grateful for her chance. Yet her

working-day is as long as her brother’s. Her chance, alone, is less. For

the same hours and the same toil, her stipend is one-fourth smaller than

his smallest.

At three o’clock P. M., hats and shawls come down from their pegs,

lunch-baskets come forth from their hiding-places, the great corridors,

and porticoes, and broad streets are thronged with homeward-wending

workers. For the space of half an hour, the Treasury-offices and halls

seem deserted, and then—Lo! the Broom Brigade! Cobwebs, dust and dirt,

no longer dim the granite steps, the tessellated floors, the marble

surfaces of the Treasury-building, as they used to do, years ago.

Congress has provided a Broom Brigade, with fifteen dollars a month, to

pay each member—and here they come, the sweepers, the dusters and the

scrubbers—ninety women!

Three years ago, was established the present efficient system of daily

cleaning of the Treasury, exclusively under feminine control, with what

perfect result, all who remember the Treasury as it was, and see it as

it is, can bear witness.

These ninety women-workers are under the exclusive control of a lady

custodian. The organization, supervision, general control, payment,

etc., of this small army of sweepers, brushers and scrubbers, all

devolve on her. She is a fair and stately woman, wearing a crown of

snow-white hair, her soul looking out of eyes clear and bright, yet of

tender blue. Her face tells its own story of sorrow outlived, and of

deep human sympathy. Did it tell any other, she would not be the right

woman in the right place. No woman who has not suffered, who is not in

profound sympathy with every form of human poverty and want, could of

right reign over an army of women toilers, sweeping, scrubbing for

bread. At 4 P. M., each day, ninety women enter a little room on the

basement floor of the Treasury, there to exchange their decent street

dress for the dusty garments of toil. As they ascend the broad stairs

and disperse—broom, duster, or scrubbing-brush in hand—to make the

beautiful offices and broad halls fresh and bright for the next coming

day, the lady who guards and guides them all—who knows the history of

each one—what stories she might tell!

Here is a little woman whose husband was killed in the Union army,

leaving her nothing but his memory, his small pension, and a pair of

brave hands to support herself and three little ones. Here are two

bright little colored girls. They are students in Howard’s University,

and come every day after school, the long way to the Treasury, to earn a

part of the money which is to insure their education. Here is a young

woman whose keenly lined, sorrowful face is a history. “Months ago she

came to the silver-haired lady in the custodian’s room, and asked for

work of any kind. The possibility to grant her request did not then

exist, and again and again, with little hope, she came. At last she

applied when some necessitous vacancy in the ranks of workers rendered

it possible for the lady to assign her at once to a place of employment;

and gladly she gave it, for the petitioner was wan and despairing. After

work and the departure of the throng, she again sought the lady, to

thank her on her knees ‘for saving her life.’ She said, ‘I had made up

my mind to take my life if you refused me; I had reached the end of

every thing.’ Then followed the oft-repeated story—deception, desertion,

desperation, and the one last struggle to live”—to live honestly by

honest, albeit the lowliest toil.

“Many a soldier’s widow, struggling with smallest fortune, has occasion

to be thankful for the fifteen dollars earned here every month, although

the walk and work seem insufferable at times. Many a soldier’s orphan is

sustained by the stroke of brush and broom, making hall and stair and

wall brightly clean to the step and sight of coming visitors from far

and near, and the same shining polish which some strangers may admire,

on the perspected marble floors and wrought pilasters, is a source and

means of maintenance to humble homes when a death, desertion, and (O!

sadly often) drunkenness has removed the head and protector, and in

which life means only toil and sorrow. Every one of these ninety women

has her own story of trouble, and want, and endurance, which made up her

past, and won for her, her niche in this scheme of labor.”

Near a thousand women, from the toilers of the tubs under its roof, to

the Brush-and-Broom Brigade in its basement, are employed in the

Treasury. Their labor ranges from the lowliest manual toil, to the

highest intellectual employment. In the social scale they measure the

entire gamut of society. In isolated instances, women of exceptional

character may still hold positions in the Treasury, and in so large a

number, and under an unjust system of appointment, it would be strange

if no such case could be found. But so powerful is the public sentiment

roused against such appointments, it is impossible that they should be

longer permitted, if known. The deepest wrong which their presence ever

inflicted, was the unjust suspicion which they brought upon a large body

of intelligent, pure women. The truth is, there is not another company

of women-workers in the land which numbers so many ladies of high

character, intelligence, culture, and social position.

The country is not aware to what an extent its most noble public

servants have died poor, nor how many of their wives and daughters have

sought the Government Civil Service as the means of honorable

self-support.

Until within a short time, when the friends of their father raised a

fund for their support, the daughters of Chief-Justice Taney were

employed in the Treasury. The fair young orphan daughter of Robert J.

Walker, once Secretary of the Treasury, now supports herself by service

in the Internal Revenue. Governor Fairchild, of Wisconsin, found his

beautiful wife, the daughter of a distinguished public man, occupying a

desk in the Treasury. Mrs. Mary Johnson, daughter of Colonel Albert, who

for a long series of years was head of the Topographical Bureau, has

been for ten years a clerk in the Treasury. Her husband was Consul at

Florence, where he died. Her father passing away soon after, she found

herself alone, with two young sons to rear and educate. She became a

Government clerk, or, as that title is now officially denied to a woman,

“a Government _employé_.” Her sons are growing up to honor her, one

having entered the Naval School at Annapolis. Mrs. Tilton, sister of

General Robert Ould, is an “_employé_” in the Internal Revenue. The

widow of Captain Ringgold is also there.

The Quarter-master-General’s Office, which is a division of the War

Department, has been almost exclusively set apart for the widows,

daughters, and sisters of officers of army or navy, killed or injured in

the war. Almost without exception, the “_employés_” of this office are

gentlewomen. It is filled with elegant and accomplished women, some of

whom are remarkable for their literary and scientific attainments. These

ladies now occupy offices provided in a plain building on Fifteenth

street. Their rooms are smaller and much more private than those of the

Treasury opposite. Their work is the copying, recording, and registering

of the letters of the department. No men are employed in these offices.

Their superintendent is a lady, who has entire supervision of the ladies

and the labor of this division. She is the widow of a naval officer who

died in the service, a descendant of Benjamin Franklin, and occupies

now, as she has all her life, the highest social position. She has

children to support, and carries heavy official responsibilities—her

duties are identical with those of the head of any other bureau—she

receives only the stipend of the lowest male clerk, twelve hundred

dollars. Elizabeth Akers Allen (Florence Percy), whose deep and tender

lyrics call forth such universal response, held a position in this

office until her last marriage.

Women of education and the finest intellectual gifts are to be found in

every department. No inconsiderable number attempt to bring their meagre

nine hundred dollar salary up to the most ignorant man _employé’s_

twelve hundred, by writing for the press, or pursuing some artistic

employment outside of office hours.

The Treasury boasts of a number of more than ordinary women

correspondents, whose letters have attracted wide attention by the

really important information which they have imparted, concerning

internal workings of Departmental life and service. Foremost among

these, is Miss Austine Snead (Miss Grundy, of the New York World). Miss

Snead is the only and fatherless daughter of an accomplished gentleman.

She is a “Class-child” of Harvard College, a loyal Kentuckian whom, with

her youthful and lovely mother, the vicissitudes of war drifted to the

one work-shop of the Nation open to women. The loss of her position, by

change of administration, forced her to turn to the chance of

journalism, and in the branch of the profession which she entered, she

rose at once to the foremost rank. Mrs. Snead, formerly a famous _belle_

of Louisville, Kentucky, is one of the most patient, faithful, and

accurate counters in the redemption division of the Treasury, and is

beside, weekly correspondent of the _Louisville Courier Journal_. Both

are women who wear industry, integrity, and honor as their jewels, far

dearer to them than all the lost treasures of Fortune’s more prosperous

days.

The Internal Revenue Bureau, a branch of the Treasury Service, and

occupying beautiful apartments in the Treasury Building, employs a large

number of women. Copying, recording, filing of letters, and keeping

accounts, make the chief work of this division. It demands a high order

of clerical ability, and the books kept by these ladies are marvels of

mechanical beauty.

The complications and immensity of the Internal Revenue Service, make

this one of the busiest offices in the entire Department. It contains

from forty-five to fifty women—_employés_. Beside those who execute the

exquisite copper-plate copying, there are many whose whole duty is “head

work.” This consists of examining, sorting, and filing the different

daily communications received at the office. These are of one hundred

and fifty varieties, concerning internal revenue, taxes, etc., subjects

usually supposed not to be particularly lucid to the average feminine

mind. Many are employed in examining, approving, and recording reports

of surveys of distilleries, and other important papers; and such is the

estimate placed on their business capacity, as thus applied, that their

opinions on the papers are accepted without question.

At one of these desks sits a lovely sylph-like creature, whose bird-like

hands always reminds me of Charlotte Bronté’s. She is scarcely bigger

than the two big books which she handles and “keeps”—and to see her at

them, perched upon a high stool, _is_ “a sight.” Born and reared in

affluence, fragile in constitution, and exquisitely sensitive in

organism, she is yet intellectually one of the best clerks—no

“_employés_” in the Bureau. Years ago, she was placed at this eighteen

hundred dollar desk, which a man-clerk had just vacated. She has filled

it, performing its duties for seven or eight years, for the woman’s

stipend of nine hundred dollars. When the new Civil Service Rules first

went into operation, she was awarded twelve hundred dollars per annum,

for her service from that date. To have awarded her the remaining six

hundred dollars, which was paid the man at the same desk, for doing the

same work, would have been an equality of justice, from which the

average official masculine mind instinctively recoiled.

_Apropos_ of the preponderance of favor with which this same official

masculine mind is able to regard and reward itself, is the case of a

lady in another division. She has mathematical genius, and is one of the

best practical mathematicians in the Treasury Department. Many of the

statistical tables, for reports to Congress, are made out by her.

Members of Congress, on the most important committees, do not disdain to

come to her for assistance in making out their reports. Near two years

ago, a man-clerk, in the same room with this lady, (who received his

appointment through political favoritism,) became so dissipated, that he

was totally unfitted to fulfil the duties of his desk, and he was

carried by his friends to an inebriate asylum. Since that time, this

lady, in addition to the arduous duties of her own desk, has performed

all the labor accruing to that of the absent inebriate. She whose

official existence as a clerk is denied by the legislators who employ

her, has performed steadily, for many months, the labor of two

men-clerks. How much does she receive for so doing? Nine hundred dollars

a year. The eighteen hundred dollars, which she earns at one desk, is

paid to the drunkard in whose name she earns it!

The Government, who support this man for being a drunkard, forces a

woman to do his work for nothing, or lose the chance of earning the

pittance paid to her in her own name. This lady, broken in health by her

long-continued and overtaxing toil, sees what before her? Surely not

recognition or justice from the Government which she serves and honors,

while it, through selfishness and injustice, disgraces itself.

Of the forty-five ladies in the Internal Revenue Bureau, there is but

one, and she fifty years of age, who has not more than herself to

support on the pittance which she is paid. Nevertheless, whenever a

spasmodic cry of “retrenchment” is raised, three women are always

dismissed from office, to one man, although the men so greatly outnumber

the women, to say nothing of their being so much more expensive.

“One of the greatest advocates of economy took work from a woman whose

pay was the invariable nine hundred dollars per year, to give it to a

man, who received for doing it, sixteen hundred dollars. No complaint

was made of her manner of doing the work, but the head of the division

said that she could count money, and he had not enough work for the men.

Nothing was said of dismissing the superfluous male clerks. The work

given the manly mind, in this instance, was the entering of dates of

redemption opposite the numbers of redeemed notes. A child of ten years

could scarcely have blundered at it. The same date was written sometimes

for two weeks at a time.”

The lady at the head of the woman’s division of the Internal Revenue

Bureau, has filled the position, with marked efficiency, for ten years,

and upon the adoption of the new Civil Service Rules, she was authorized

to receive eighteen hundred dollars per annum.

The lady who is one of the librarians of the library of the Treasury, is

an accomplished linguist, a very intellectual woman. She was appointed

by Mr. Boutwell, and received sixteen hundred dollars.

There are some very important desks filled by ladies in the Fifth

Auditor’s office. Into their hands come all consular reports. To fulfil

their duties efficiently, they must possess a knowledge of banking, as

well as of mathematics.

Before the Civil Service Rules were vetoed, several ladies competed in

one, two, and three examinations. Thus several won, by pure intellectual

test, twelve hundred dollars, sixteen hundred dollars, eighteen hundred

dollars, and one or two, I believe, a twenty-two hundred dollars

position.

In the office of the Comptroller of the Treasury, are some very

important desks filled by ladies. One young lady in this office has

charge of the correspondence with the national banks and engraving

companies. This involves a complicated routine. The desk was formerly

filled by a man who received fourteen hundred dollars. It was taken from

him because he was two hundred letters behind date. The work which has

been in charge of this lady for six or seven years, at nine hundred

dollars per annum, is always even with the day.

Another young lady, in this office, prepares an abstract of the

circulation issued and returned by national banks, by means of which an

immediate answer can be given, when information is asked, as to the

outstanding circulation of any particular bank. Another laborious task,

performed in this office by a lady, is the preparation of an abstract of

the number of notes of each denomination and issue, work requiring great

intellectual exactness and care.

In the Post Office Department, there are forty-seven women who address

“returned letters,” _i. e._, letters which have miscarried, and which

are to be returned, if the signature, or anything inside the letter,

gives a clue to whom it is to be sent. There are ten women who fold

“dead letters,” and three who translate foreign letters.

The lady in charge of the women clerks in the Dead-Letter Office, is the

daughter of an officer high in rank in the army, now dead. Her

grandfather was the President of a New England college. Mrs. Pettigru

King, whose father was the Governor of South Carolina, and a member of

the United States Senate, herself a woman of remarkable talents, was

long employed in the Dead-Letter Office. Sitting among many younger

women, her hands flying as swift as any of theirs—the daily task, that

of re-directing two hundred letters, usually completed by her before

that of any one else—we see a fair, round-faced, blue-eyed woman, whose

sudden, bright glance and rapid movements at once fix our attention. She

looks to be about fifty; she is in reality over seventy years of age.

She and her history combined, probably make as remarkable a fact as the

Dead-Letter Office contains. She is the widow of a clergyman. When the

war broke out, her only son became hopelessly insane. “As he could not

go to the war, I went myself,” she said. As the Assistant-Manager of the

United States Sanitary Committee for an entire State, she raised, in

money, ten thousand dollars, and collected and distributed ninety

thousand hospital articles. She was in the field, in the hospital, and

travelling between certain large cities, till the close of the war. Just

as she finished her great work, she fell and broke one of her limbs.

This confined her to her room for six months. In the meantime, her

daughter’s husband died, leaving her with three little children, and no

income. Soon after, the mother lost what little she had, and the entire

family were left penniless. After an unsuccessful attempt at the widow’s

forlorn hope, “keeping boarders,” mother and daughter came to

Washington, and sought for positions in the Departments. “Friends tried

to dissuade us,” said the old lady. “They told us that we must not come

here, to mingle with such people as they thought were in the

Departments. We have _not_ seen them. I have been three years in the

Post Office Department, and my daughter in the Treasury, and we have met

none but respectable women.”

Three winters ago, by act of Congress, she was allowed to place her

insane son in the Lunatic Asylum here, free of charge, leaving her at

liberty to assist her daughter in the support of her young family.

Notwithstanding her war services, and the names of twenty prominent men

in her native State attached to her papers, it took her six months to

obtain, for herself and daughter, the chances to labor which she sought.

“Sorrow does not kill,” she says, and as we look into her beaming eyes,

we say it does not even extinguish the brightness of a soul forever

young,—and yet this lady, in a few eventful years, “lived through sorrow

enough to break any heart less stout than hers.”

In the Patent Office, fifty-two women clerks are allowed by law. A few

women are employed in copying Pension Rolls in the Pension Office, who

have a room provided for them in the Patent Office. Ten or twelve women

have work given them from the Patent Office, which they do at their

homes. This work, as well as that done in the Office, consists chiefly

of the drawing of models. Every model of all the tens of thousands

received in the Patent Office, from the beginning to the present day,

has thus been re-produced and preserved. Glazed transparent linen is

placed over the engraved lines, and through this, with ink and stencil,

the most intricate and exquisite lines are drawn. To do this work

perfectly, a lady must be something of an artist and draughtswoman.

Magnifying glasses are used, and even with their aid, the work is most

trying, and often destructive to the eyesight. The salary fixed for this

work is ten hundred dollars per annum. Those who take their work home,

and are paid by the piece, make as much as those who give the work will

allow. Here, of course, is a large opportunity for favoritism and

injustice. Thus favorites are often allowed to do twice their share,

while others get barely work enough to subsist.

The Agricultural Department affords temporary employment for numbers of

women, for two or three months of the year, and two have permanent

positions there. The temporary work is the putting up of seeds for

universal distribution, and occasionally copying is given out. Of the

two ladies who find constant employment there, one is the assistant of

Professor Glover, in taking charge of the Museum. She is the widow of a

western editor, and at one time had exclusive control of a public

journal (an agricultural one,) herself. She is a woman of large

intelligence, a proficient in botany and natural history, which fact

gave her, her present position, and enabled her to fill it with credit

to herself. The other lady _employé_ is a taxidermist, who prepares the

birds and insects for the Museum. The officers of this Department regard

her as a proficient in her profession. She is a German, has been

connected with the Department over six years, and has a room provided

for her in the beautiful agricultural building.

Woman’s work in the Government Printing-Office, remains yet to be

noticed, but enough has been mentioned, to prove its value in other

branches of the Civil Service. It would be strange if so large a hive

held no drones. It is doubtless true, that while many women are not only

qualified, but actually perform the duties of the highest class desks,

for an unjust pittance, many more do not even earn their nine hundred

dollars per annum. There could be no more striking proof of the

inequality and injustice which prevail in our Civil Service, than the

fact that such persons, men and women, are appointed by men in power,

really to be supported by the Government, and receive from that

Government, for inefficiency and idleness, all, and more, than is paid

often to the most intellectual, the most efficient, the most devoted of

its servants.

CHAPTER XXXV.

WOMEN’S WORK IN THE TREASURY—HOW APPOINTMENTS

ARE MADE.

The Scales of Justitia—Where They Hang and Where They Do Not Hang—The

Difference Between Men and Women—Reform a “Sham!”—The First

Women-Clerks—A Shameful and Disgraceful Fraud—What Two Women

Did—Cutting Down the Salaries of Women—The First Woman-Clerk in the

Treasury—Taking Her Husband’s Place—Working “_in Her Brother’s

Name_”—A Matter of Expediency—The Feminine Tea-Pot—The Secretary

Growls at the Tea-Pots—The Hegira of the Tea-Pots—Thackeray’s

Opinion of Nature’s Intentions—Blind on One Side—In War Days—General

Spinner Visits Secretary Chase—“A Woman can Use Scissors Better than

a Man”—Profound Discovery!—“She’ll do it _Cheaper_”—“Light

Work”—“Recognized”—Besieged by Women—Scenes of Distress and

Trouble—Hundreds of Homeless Women—After the War—How the

Appointments were Made—Creating an Interest—The Advantages of the

“Sinners”—Infamous Intrigues—The Baseness of Certain Senators—Virtue

Spattered with Mud—A Disgrace to the Nation—Secret Doings in High

Places—New Civil Service Rules—Sounding Magnanimous—Passing the

Examination—The Irrepressible Masculine Tyrants—The New Rules a

Perfect Failure—Up to the Mark, but not Winning—An Alarming

Suggestion—Men _versus_ Women—Tampering with the Scales—How Much a

Woman Ought to be Paid—Opinion of a Man in Power—Interesting

Description of an Average Representative—“Keeping Women in Their

Place”—Getting up a Speech on Women—The Man who Stayed at

Home—Generosity of the “Back-Pay” Congress—What Women Believe Ought

to be Done.

On the carved cornices which surmount windows and mirrors in the

spacious Office of the Secretary of the Treasury may be seen, equally

balanced above its keys, the scales of Justitia. Would that they

symbolized the equal justice reigning through the minutest division of

the great departments of the Government service.

Weighted with human selfishness, perhaps this is impossible. Majestic in

aspect, great in magnitude, in energy and action, they will never be

morally grand till they are established and perpetuated in absolute

equity. In that hour the scales of Justitia will hang in equal balance

above the head of the masculine and feminine worker. Whatever _their_

difference, there will be no disparity in the equity which shall

measure, weigh and reward equal toil. To-day the departments of

Government teem with kindness and favoritism to individual women. What

they lack is justice to woman. This they have lacked from the beginning.

What a comment on human selfishness is the fact, that with all the

legislation of successive Congresses, the employment of women in the

departments of the Government is to-day as it was in the

beginning—perpetuated in favoritism and injustice. Civil Service Reform,

as carried on, is a mockery and a sham. Nowhere has its hollow pretence

been so visible—so keenly felt—as in its utter failure of simple justice

to the woman-worker in the public service.

From the beginning, when her work has been tacitly recognized and

rewarded as a man’s, her sex has been proscribed. The first work given

to women from the Government was issued from the General Land Office, as

early, if not earlier, than President Pierce’s administration, and

consisted of the copying of land warrants. This work was sent to their

homes. They received it in the name of some male relative, and for that

reason were paid what he would have received for doing it, viz., twelve

hundred dollars per annum. One lady supported a worthless husband (the

nominal clerk) and her two children in this way, doing all his work for

him. Another supported herself, her two nephews, and educated them out

of the same salary.

During Mr. Buchanan’s administration, this work was taken out of

feminine hands, to a very large extent, and the few allowed to retain it

were paid only six hundred dollars. Somewhere in this era the first

woman clerk appeared in the Treasury. She was a wife who, during her

husband’s illness, was allowed to take his desk and to do his work, for

his support and their children’s. This she continued to do until her

second marriage; but it was _in her brother’s name_. She copied and

recorded, did both well, and was paid—not because she did well, but

because she did her work in the name of a man—sixteen hundred dollars

per annum. Thus, while this lady performed the work of a man, and

performed it in his name, as a woman her presence at the desk was a

subterfuge, and her official existence ignored.

Without recognition or acknowledgment, the woman-clerk system in the

Treasury Department is an outgrowth of expediency. Like many another

fact born of the same parentage, it soon proved its own right to

existence, and refused to be extinguished.

By the time that Secretary McCulloch made his advent, the feminine

tea-pot had invaded every window-ledge. The Secretary complained of the

accumulation of tea-pots in the Treasury of the nation. They vanished,

and ceased to distill the gentle beverage for the woman-worker at her

noonday lunch. “Nature meant kindly by woman when it made her the

tea-plant,” Thackeray says. The presence of her tea-pot was made a

mental and moral sign, by political philosophers, that woman was unfit

for Government service. Nobody ever heard that the costly cigars and

tobacco which filled the man clerk’s “nooning,” to the exhilaration of

his body and soul, was a like sign of his inability to perform prolonged

service without the aid of stimulants.

In war days, when tens of thousands of men were withdrawn from civil

labor, and when one day’s expense to the Government equalled a whole

year’s in the time of Washington, General Spinner went to Secretary

Chase and said: “A woman can use scissors better than a man, and she

will do it cheaper. I want to employ women to cut the Treasury notes.”

Mr. Chase consented, and soon the great rooms of the Treasury witnessed

the unwonted sight of hundreds of women, scissors in hand, cutting and

trimming each Treasury-note sheet into four separate notes. This was

“light work;” but if anybody supposes it easy, let him try it for hours

without stopping, and the exquisite pain in his shoulder-joints and the

blisters on his fingers will bear aching witness to his mistake.

Washington was full of needy women, of women whom the exigencies of war

had suddenly bereft of protection and home. In her appointment at that

hour, political differences went for nothing. Every poor woman who

applied to the good General was given work if he had it. A pair of

scissors were placed in her hands, and she was told to go at it. She had

no official appointment or existence. During 1862, these women were paid

six hundred dollars per annum out of the fund provided by Congress for

temporary clerks. A year or two later the working existence of these

women was recognized in the annual appropriation bills.

After that it did not take long to spread through the land that the

Government Departments in Washington offered work to women. The land was

full—fuller than ever before of women who needed work to live.

Necessity, exaggeration, romance and sorrow, combined as propelling

motives, and the Capital was soon overrun with women seeking Government

employment. Then, more conspicuously than to-day, the supply far

exceeded the demand. The disappointment, the suffering, the sin which

grew out of this fact, can never be measured.

The war had torn the whole social fabric like an earthquake. Society

seemed upheaved from its foundations—shattered, and scattered in chaos.

Nowhere was this so apparent as in Washington. Women seeking their

husbands; women, whose husbands were dead, left penniless with dependent

children. Young girls, orphaned and homeless, with women adventurers of

every phase and sort, all, sooner or later, found their way to

Washington. The male population was scarcely less chaotic. Men,

restrained and harmonized through life by the holiest influences of

home, found themselves suddenly homeless, herded together in masses,

exposed to hardships, danger and undreamed-of temptations. “Let us eat

and drink, for to-morrow we die,” seemed to be blazoned on the painted

sign-boards of the dens of drink and sin, and on the debauched and

brazen faces of the stranger men and women who jostled each other on the

crowded thoroughfares.

While thousands escaped unharmed the moral pestilence which brooded in

the air, tens of thousands more were touched with its blight, and fell.

Men and women who would have lived and died innocent, in the safe

shelter of peace and home, grew demoralized and desperate amid the rack

and ruin of war. In the hour when human nature needed every sacred

safeguard, it found itself bereft of the sweetest and best that it had

ever known. This was especially true of the hundreds of homeless women

in the Capital seeking employment. Congressional appropriations made

woman’s Government-employment at once a Congressional reward. Very soon,

every woman’s appointment to work was at the mercy of some Member of

Congress. Political or war-service might secure a man his, but what had

the woman but her bereavements, or her personal influence? For the sake

of the former, noble men, in many instances, sought and found honest

employment for noble women, for women who had given their husbands, sons

and fathers, their own heart’s blood, to their country, asking nothing

in return but the chance to work for their own bread and their

children’s.

In order to secure any Government position, the first thing a woman had

to do was to go and tell her story to a man—in all probability a

stranger—who possessed the appointing power, her chance of getting her

place depending utterly on the personal interest which she might be able

to arouse in him. If he was sufficiently interested in her story, and in

her, to make the official demand necessary, she obtained the coveted

place, no matter what her qualifications for it, or her lack of them

might be. If she failed to interest him, by no possibility could she

secure that place, unless she could succeed in winning over to her cause

another man of equal political power. If the men who held her chance for

bread were good men, and she a good woman, well; if they were bad men,

and she a weak woman, not so well. In either case, the principle

underlying the appointment was equally wrong.

It was this unjust mode of appointment which, in so many instances,

especially through the years of the war, placed side by side, with pure

and noble women, the women-adventurers and sinners, whose presence cast

so much undeserved reproach upon the innocent, and who caused the only

shadow of disrepute which has ever fallen upon woman’s Treasury-service.

Even in the worst days this class formed the exceptions to a host of

honorable and noble women, and yet the shameful fact cannot be wiped out

that men, high in political power, because they had that power, made

womanly virtue its price, and were meanly base enough to use the Civil

Service of their country to pay for their own disgraceful sins. Because

this was possible, pure women, working day by day to support themselves

and their children, were covered with the shadow of unjust suspicion,

while women, unworthy and profligate, were allowed the same positions,

with equal honor and equal pay.

There could be no greater moral injustice to woman than to place her

employment under the Government on such a basis. It put the best under

ban, while it drew those whose steps pointed downward swiftly along the

inevitable descent. There was but one redress that the State could offer

to its daughters, that of making their chance equal to that of its sons.

Then, if they failed, the failure would be their own; if they succeeded,

they would not be defrauded by the Government they served.

The new Civil-Service Rules, whatever their impracticability in other

ways, seemed to offer to the women-workers of the Government this

redress. If education and fitness were to be made the standard of

Departmental Service, alike for women as men, then the reign of

favoritism and might must end. An idle woman, the pet of some man in

power, would no longer receive all that was paid a woman filling the

desks of two men. The woman who had proved, by years of efficient

service at a man’s desk, that she was more than equal to the performing

of his duties, would cease to receive for doing them the pittance of the

veriest idler in the lobbies, and no more.

It sounded well; magnanimous men and true women, yearning only for

justice, and that it might be earned and won without ado, took heart.

Educated women from North and South, East and West, flocked to the

Capital to compete in impartial intellectual examination with men. Many

of these were teachers—all women to whom self-support, or the support of

others, were indispensable. The number of women who have passed the

highest competitive examinations, is remarkable. Their life-long

pursuits and intellectual training made it impossible that, in this

regard, they should prove second to men. The number so great, that all

could receive appointments was not probable.

In the face of so many new professions of equality of chance in the

public service for women, the astonishing fact is, that while women pass

the highest examinations with honor, it is men, with scarcely an

exception, who pass into the highest places. With a mocking outcry of

“justice and equality,” uttered to appease the universal demand,

selfishness and might still prevail in all departmental appointments.

Political and personal influence appoint women to-day, just as they did

before one woman was summoned to compete in intellectual examination

with men.

“You were fools to expect a twelve-hundred-dollar clerkship because you

passed the examination of that class,” said a high appointing officer of

the Treasury to two ladies, one who had come from a far Western, the

other from a far Eastern State. Both ladies passed the highest

competitive examination—both, after months of wearing anxiety and

struggle, with the wolf at the door, received—a nine-hundred-dollar

clerkship. Did they receive even that on the high merit of their

competitive examination? Not at all; had their appointment depended on

that, they would not have received one at all. Sick and worn out, they

received it at last on the special plea of two men in office, each

having political power in his respective State.

With such results, I ask, what is a competitive examination to women but

a shame to the power that treacherously offers it? The man who passes

such an examination cannot receive less than a twelve-hundred-dollar

clerkship; the woman who passes triumphantly the severest intellectual

test offered by the Government, cannot receive more than a

nine-hundred-dollar position. Why? So many women came to Washington and

proved, by actual mental examination, that they were fully competent to

fill the highest civil offices in the departments, its officials became

alarmed. “Taken on their attainments, they will push out the men,” they

exclaimed, in alarm. Then straightway they fell back, as men in power

always do, to carry their own ends on unjust legislation. They based

their decision on the Act of Congress of four years ago, which fixed the

salary of all women employed in the Government Departments at nine

hundred dollars per annum.

The result of all the loud hypocritical outcry of civil equality to

women is, that hereafter, no matter how high the competitive examination

which she passes, no matter what the services which she renders, no

woman is to receive more than nine hundred dollars per year for any

appointment received after a certain date; and no man, no matter how low

the labor which he performs, be it only as a messenger to run through

the halls, is to receive less than twelve hundred dollars per annum.

Cast down your scales, O, Justitia, let them shiver to atoms on its

marble floor for hanging in equal balance above the keys of the Treasury

of the United States. They are a mocking lie. Beneath these desecrated

symbols sits the Secretary of the Treasury, and to him a few shrinking,

yet daring, women have appealed. “Four hundred dollars a year is enough

for any woman to be paid for her work,” replies this accidental

potentate, borne from obscurity to power solely by the “boosting” of a

friend, who lifted him from his unthought-of “bench” in Massachusetts,

with no guarantee of fitness from his past, to the chiefship of the

Treasury of the Nation. “Four hundred dollars is enough for any woman to

receive for her work, and more than she could earn anywhere else,”

replies this man.

This one remark, pitted against the facts recorded in this chapter,

proved the man who made it as too narrow-minded and unjust, too pervaded

with the caste and selfishness of sex, to be fit to hold the appointing

power over hundreds of women, in culture and intellectually more than

his peers. No man whose spring of action is “might is right” has a right

to rule.

To-day nothing could be more humiliating to a high-spirited,

intelligent, honorable woman, than to sit in the gallery of the Hall of

Representatives and be compelled to listen to a debate on woman’s work

and wages going on below. Yet if she never heard the words uttered by

men who claim to be the representatives of the people, and who make the

laws which define her rights and decide her rewards, she could never

realize how selfish, ungenerous, and unjust is the average man who

assumes to represent woman, and to legislate for her welfare. These men,

on the average, are fairly good husbands and indulgent fathers. They are

anything but tyrants, personally, to the women of their families. But

their personal relations do not prevent them from placing a very low

estimate upon the powers, performance, place and prospects of women in

general. Their caste of sex infiltrates through every word they utter.

The man who is “bound to keep woman in her place,” before he makes a

speech to that effect, rushes into the Congressional Library, and asks

Mr. Spofford to give him every book which will help him to prove that

woman is a weak and inefficient creature. He then proceeds to “cram”

himself with a crude mass of statements, which he extracts pell-mell out

of a heap of books. This unassimilated and impracticable load he

delivers, a few days later, to Congress, to the galleries, and to the

_Globe_—to prove that—no matter what her qualities or qualifications,

moral or mental—being a woman, for that fact alone, she must not be a

clerk, but an “_employé_;” and no matter what she has done or is capable

of doing in the service of the Government, for that service she must

receive but nine hundred dollars, and the sum be fixed by law.

There are honorable exceptions—a few men in Congress who, in the

broadest and best sense, are the friends of woman. They form a small

minority. The majority, after having made woman’s very existence as a

Government-worker to depend on their own personal favoritism or caprice,

stand up in Congress and cast stones at the very class which they have

themselves created. In nine cases out of ten, these men staid at home

while others fought their country’s battles. And now they reward the

widows and orphans of soldiers and sailors by giving them a reluctant

chance to earn their bread on half-pay. They do it under sufferance,

while these legislators withhold just remuneration, sneer at their work,

and defame their characters.

The Forty-second Congress, which, in its most hurried moments, could

take time to vote to its members an increase of salary from five

thousand to eight thousand a year, rejected without debate a proposition

to give women-clerks in the departments equal compensation with men, for

the same labor. What added proof is required to show that the law-making

power of our land is fast becoming a monied monopoly—a legislature for

the rich—an ignorer of the poor. “Eight thousand dollars every twelve

months, by dint of close economy, will keep my wife and daughters in

silks and velvets; will give them a phæton by the sea, and make

beautiful their paths upon the mountain tops! What to me are the wives

and daughters of the poor? What care of mine the widows and orphans of

men who perished in their country’s service, if they do support

themselves and their children by working for this just Government, which

I help to make, for nine hundred dollars a year! while I pay at least

twelve hundred to the laziest masculine lout who dawdles with papers

across the Treasury floors?”

Yet there was scarcely a Member of that Congress that would not repel

with jest or sneer the mere mention of woman’s demand, in the face of

such injustice, to legislate for herself. If you would avert this

catastrophe, gentlemen, show that you are capable of just legislation;

prove that the power of franchise does not always beget oppression to

the disfranchised. I point to the practical working of the new

Civil-Service Rules, to your own greedy grasp of additional thousands,

with the refusal to grant three meagre hundreds to working women, to

prove that woman has no hope of justice in man’s representation.

Represent her interests with half the eager avidity which marks your

devotion to your own, and she will never ask to represent herself. But

no matter what her individual distaste to public responsibility, nothing

is more apparent to the wide-visioned, thoughtful woman than that, in a

republic, the only possibility of obtaining personal justice lies in

political equality.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL LIFE—HOW PLACE AND POWER ARE WON.

Government Official Life—Its Effects on Human Nature—Keeping his Eye

Open—The Sweet and Winning Ways of Mr. Parasite—In Office—The

Fault of “the People” and “my Friends”—Shrinking from

Responsibilities—Pulling the Wool over the Eyes of the

Innocent—Writing Letters in a Big Way—The “Dark Ways” of Wicked

Mr. P——— —A Suspicious Yearning for Private Life—The Sweets of

Office—A Little Change of Opinion—A Man Afflicted with Too Many

Friends—Forgetting Things that Were—John Jones is not

Encouraged—Post-offices as Plentiful as Blackberries—Receiving

Office-seekers—“The Worst Thing in the World for You”—Dismissing

John—Over-crowded Pastures—John’s Own Private Opinion—The “Mighty

Messenger”—Government-Servants—Peculiar Impartiality of the Man in

Office—What the Successful Man Said—I Change My Opinion of Him—A

Certain Kind of Man, and Where He can be Found.

Governmental official life has one effect upon those whom it benefits,

which is anything but creditable to human nature.

Mr. Parasite wants a high place in the governmental service, and

circumstances favor his getting it. While there is any doubt about it,

he does not disdain to use any influence within his reach to make it

certain. How lovely he is to everybody whose good word or ill word may

“tell” for or against him. How affable he is to every mortal, from the

lowliest outspoken man in his home town, to the influential writer,

whose powerful pen he wishes to propitiate. Mr. Parasite glides into his

place with grace and resignation. “The people, the people, you know, and

my friends—_they_ forced it upon me. They quite overrate my fitness,

quite. I shrink from such responsibilities, such arduous labors; but, if

my country needs me, if my constituents _demand_ my services, I feel

that I have no right to refuse, no right to consult my personal ease,

although the desire of my heart is for the peaceful quiet of private

life.”

[Illustration:

THE LOBBY OF THE SENATE.

INSIDE THE CAPITOL.—WASHINGTON.

]

Strange to tell, when an accommodating people are about to grant him the

desire of his heart, Mr. Parasite suddenly starts up alert, and touches

the springs of a most powerful enginery. He writes personal letters by

thousands; he has his friends—i. e. agents—at work for him everywhere,

whispering with this one, arguing with that one, and urging his claims

incessantly upon the appointing power. But who, that did not know it,

could believe it.

Chance to light upon Mr. Parasite about this time, and mention the

subject of his possible appointment or election to him as one in which

he is naturally interested. Lo! amid all others, Mr. Parasite alone is

indifferent. “Of course, it would be a compliment, a re-election or

re-appointment. He would prize it much as a mark of confidence from the

people, or the Government; but really, so far as personal desires go,

private life.”

_Private life_ still fills the measure of his yearning. “Retirement” is

still the goal of his desire. This is but the weakness; the crime of Mr.

Parasite is revealed further on. The long suspense over, safely

ensconced in that official chair, while its cushions are a new delight,

its honors are fresh, its powers unwonted, perhaps a consciousness of

gratitude remains with Mr. Parasite. It’s a pleasant office, very.

Carpeted, cushioned, curtained, pictured, secluded. It is pleasant,

very. This ever-acknowledged honor of official state, messengers flying

at your bid, doors swinging noiselessly at your approach, hats springing

into air as you pass by, _lorgnettes_ lifted by fair hands in great

assemblies, the crowd peering and shouting, “There goes the great Mr.

Parasite!” Sweet, also, are the newly-found uses of official

power—sweeter even than to die for one’s country. The privileges of

patronage, the consciousness of power over the fate of others, the uses

of power in ministering to self—first sought and last relinquished—of

all the gifts of office.

While all these retain the charm of newness, a sense of gratitude may

remain with Mr. Parasite towards those who led and lifted him to his

high estate. Rarely strong in any man, the sense of gratitude with

continued office is sure to die out. When he first enters, and the

memory of fresh services remains with him, he may feel, at least

faintly, that he owes something to somebody besides himself; but the

longer he remains, the surer he is that all is his by right, all due to

his own exalted merit. There comes a time when it seems as if that

cushioned chair, that luxurious office, those muffled doors, those

cringing messengers, were all made especially for him and to do him

service. With a growing sense of security in his position, comes,

perhaps, an unconscious indifference toward those who, in the beginning,

helped to lift him toward it. There is no intentional ingratitude, only

it is so easy for some natures to forget others when they cease to need

them.

Then, too, official place, even in a republican government, hourly feeds

in a man his love of power, and his sense of personal importance. It

feeds the vanity and self-satisfaction of poor human nature, when its

fellows are dependent upon it even for the smallest favors. Few meet

this test and survive it their noblest selves. It is astonishing how

soon Mr. Parasite forgets that, a short time since, he was a seeker of

favors himself, and is sure to be again, before old age strands him amid

things gone by in the long-deferred haven of private life.

While a feeling of dependence on others survives, an emotion of

gratitude lingers, Mr. Parasite will try to treat other applicants for

office as he desired to be treated a few short months since himself. But

these emotions were never known to live through a single stress of a

single term of office.

Poor Mr. Parasite is very much beset! Every hour in the day somebody

wants something that somebody believes is in Mr. Parasite’s power to

bestow. It may be flattering, but it is also wearing, tearing,

exasperating, and even maddening, sometimes, to a man to be deemed the

dispenser of so much power and patronage. He cannot give everybody all

that everybody may ask—of course not. This is not all his sin. His sin

is this: He comes in time (usually in a marvellously short time) to

regard every one seeking the patronage of his office as a mendicant on

his personal bounty, rather than as a member of one class with himself.

Because he gained the highest honor, he forgets that he got it on the

very same principle that John Jones, who, armed with credentials from

his minister and doctor, so humbly sues for the post-office of Mudtown.

He listens to the sister pleading for her brother, the wife for her

husband, the father for his son, the poor man for himself, and because

it is little each asks, despises each accordingly, lectures each on the

folly of wanting any Government place whatever. The one thing that he

cannot remember, and which it is most delightful to forget, is that he

was ever in John Jones’ place himself.

To be sure, he did not sue for the Mudtown post-office. He wanted a

foreign ministry, a home secretaryship, to be a Senator, or, at least, a

Governor. He begged or bartered for these Government-gifts precisely as

John does for his post-office. Both are equally office-seekers; but

there is such disparity between John’s little Alpha and the Omega of Mr.

Parasite’s desires, the latter does not recognize in this seeker of

small things his remotest cousin. Comparatively few dare demand

ministries and secretaryships, while post-offices and their ilk are as

plentiful as blackberries, and their pickers equally so—so plentiful

that Mr. Parasite leans back in his cushioned chair, on his official

tripod, and wonders _which_ John Jones it will be next, and what _he_

will want; and, when one of the innumerable Johns, waiting outside, is

admitted by a mighty messenger, whose official state is more

overwhelming even than his master’s, the suppliant quakes to the bottom

of his boots in the presence of the powerful potentate, Mr. Parasite.

“What do _you_ want?” says the potentate, in a tone which implies in

advance, “You can’t have it.”

“Only the Mudtown post-office,” says John, “or—or anything that I can

get.”

“Impossible; I have nothing—nothing for you,” says the potentate, in a

remote and superior tone, which indicates, as only a tone can, that he,

the potentate, needs nothing at present himself. And who can imagine

that he ever did? “Why on earth do so many of you come for Government

employment? Don’t you know it is the worst thing in the world for you?

You had better go to work. Do anything, rather than to hang upon the

Government.”

Thus _one_ John is dismissed, to go and browse in the closely-cropped

and over-crowded pastures of the inefficient and ne’er-do-well

mediocrity.

Several days later, when John rebounds from the shock imparted by Mr.

Parasite’s grandeur, its momentum sends him pat against a fact. “Why, he

is a hanger-on to the Government himself.” Yes; and so, in one sense, is

every office-holder, from the President down to the mighty messenger who

condescends to shut and open doors. It implies no discredit to be a

server of the Government; but it reveals a very ignoble side of human

nature, when the favored holder rebuffs the lowliest seeker as a being

from another race, in any essential quality the antipodes of himself.

A man who has just been lifted by his friends from one high place to

another, has long boasted, while in power, “that he would not help a

friend sooner than an enemy.” I had a certain admiration for him till I

knew that he said this, and proved it by his practice. There is

something true and grateful and noble lacking in a man’s nature, when he

turns from his friend as he would from an enemy, doing nothing for

either; always taking, and never giving; always seeking, yet sneering at

others who seek; always subsisting on Government bounty and place

himself, while he wounds, ignores, and sometimes insults the

unfortunates who wish to do likewise and can’t.

This is Mr. Parasite, and he lives, reigns and flourishes, as parasites

only can, in every department of governmental state.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

THE DEAD LETTER OFFICE—ITS MARVELS AND MYSTERIES.

The Post-Office—Its Architecture—The Monolithic Corinthian

Columns—The Postal Service in Early Times—The Act of Queen

Anne’s Reign—“Her Majesty’s Colonies”—After the Revolution—The

First Postmaster-General—The Present Chief—A Cabinet

Minister—The Subordinate Officers—Their Positions and Duties—The

Ocean Mail Postal Service—The Contract Office—The Finance

Office—The Inspection Office—Complaints and Misdoings—Benjamin

Franklin’s Appointment—He Goes into Debt—One Hundred and Twenty

Years Ago—Franklin Performs Wonderful Works—His Ideas of

Speed—Between Boston and Philadelphia in Six Weeks—Dismissed

from Office—The Congress of “The Confederation”—A New Post

Office System—Franklin Comes In Again—The Inspector of Dead

Letters—Not Allowed to Take Copies of Letters—Only Seventy-five

Offices in the States—Primitive Regulations—Only One

Clerk—Government Stages—The Office at Washington—Saved from the

British Troops—Franklin’s Old Ledger—The Present Number of Post

Offices—The Dead Letter Office—The Ladies Too Much Squeezed—Some

of the Ladies “Packed”—Opening the Dead Letters—Why Certain

Persons are Trusted—Three Thousand Thoughtless People—Valuable

Letters—Ensuring Correctness—The Property Branch—The Touching

Story of the Photographs—The Return Branch—What the Postmaster

Says.

Though injured in comparison by the higher site and loftier walls of the

Patent-Office opposite, the Post-Office, in itself, is one of the most

beautiful public buildings in Washington. It occupies the entire block

situated on Seventh and Eighth streets west, and E and F streets north.

Like the Treasury and Patent-Office, it incloses a grassy court-yard on

which its inner offices look out.

The architecture of the Post-Office is a modified Corinthian, and is

regarded by critics as the best representation of the Italian palatial

ever built upon this continent. It was designed chiefly by F. A. Walter,

at that time architect of the Capitol, an artist who has left monuments

of architectural beauty behind him in marble which, seemingly, can never

perish. On the Seventh street side there is a vestibule, the ceiling of

which is composed of richly ornamented marbles, supported by four marble

columns; the walls, niches and floors are of marble, polished and

tessellated. This is the grand entrance to the General Post-Office

Department. The F street front affords accommodation to the city Post

Office. It has a deeply recessed portico in the centre, consisting of

eight columns grouped in pairs, and flanked by coupled pilasters

supporting an entablature which girds the entire work. The portico is

supported by an arcade which furnishes ample convenience for the

delivery of letters, and the hurrying crowds which come after them. The

Corinthian columns of this portico are each formed of a single block of

marble, and each in itself is a marvel of architectural grace. The

entrance for the mail wagons, on Eighth street, consists of a grand

archway, the spandrels of which bear upon their face, sculpture

representing Steam and Electricity, while a mask, representing Fidelity,

forms the key-stone.

The Postal Service of the country is the oldest branch of the

Government. As early as the year 1792, a proposition was introduced into

the General Assembly of Virginia, to establish the office of

Postmaster-General of Virginia and other parts of America. The

proposition became a law, but was never carried into effect. In 1710,

during the reign of Queen Anne, the British Parliament established a

General Post-Office for all Her Majesty’s dominions. By this act, the

Postmaster-General was permitted to have one chief letter office in New

York, and other chief letter offices at some convenient place or places

in each of Her Majesty’s provinces or colonies in America. When the

colonies threw off their allegiance to the Crown, especial care was

given to preserving, as far as possible, the postal facilities of the

country. When the Federal Constitution was adopted, the right was

secured to Congress “to establish Post-Offices and Post-Roads.” In 1789,

Congress created the office of Postmaster-General, and defined his

duties. Other laws have since been passed, regulating the increased

powers and duties of the Department, which is now, next to the Treasury,

the most extensive in the country.

The Postmaster-General, the head of the Department, is a member of the

President’s Cabinet, and is in charge of the postal affairs of the

United States. The business of the various branches of the Department is

conducted in his name and by his authority. He has a general supervision

of the whole Department, and issues all orders concerning the service

rendered the Government through his subordinates. During the first

administrations of the Government, the Postmaster-General was not

regarded as a Cabinet Minister, but simply as the head of a Bureau. In

1829, General Jackson invited Mr. Barry, the gentleman appointed by him

to that office, to a seat in his Cabinet. Since that time, the

Postmaster-General has been recognized, as _ex-officio_, a Cabinet

Minister.

The first Postmaster-General was Samuel Osgood, of Massachusetts. The

present Postmaster is Marshall Jewell, of Hartford, Connecticut.

The subordinate officers of the Department are three Assistant

Postmaster-Generals, and the Chief of the Inspection Office.

The Appointment Office is in charge of the First Assistant

Postmaster-General. To this office are assigned all questions which

relate to the establishment and discontinuance of post-offices, changes

of sites and names, appointment and removal of postmasters, and _route_

and local agents, as, also, the giving of instructions to postmasters.

Postmasters are furnished with marking and rating-stamps and

letter-balances by this Bureau, which is charged also with providing

blanks and stationery for the use of the Department, and with the

superintendence of the several agencies established for supplying

postmasters with blanks. “To this Bureau is likewise assigned the

supervision of the ocean-mail steamship-lines, and of the foreign and

international postal arrangements.”

The Contract-Office is in charge of the Second Assistant

Postmaster-General. To this office is assigned the business of arranging

the mail service of the United States, and placing the same under

contract, embracing all correspondence and proceedings affecting the

frequency of trips, mode of conveyance, and time of departures and

arrivals on all the _routes_; the course of the mail between the

different sections of the country; the points of mail distribution; and

the regulations for the government of the domestic mail service of the

United States. It prepares the advertisements for mail proposals,

receives the bids, and takes charge of the annual and occasional mail

lettings, and the adjustment and execution of the contracts. All

applications for the establishment or alteration of mail arrangements,

and the appointment of mail messengers, should be sent to this office.

All claims should be submitted to it for transportation service not

under contract, as the recognition of said service is first to be

obtained through the Contract-Office as a necessary authority for the

proper credits at the Auditor’s-Office.

From this office all postmasters at the ends of _routes_ receive the

statement of mail arrangements prescribed for the respective _routes_.

It reports weekly to the Auditor all contracts executed and all orders

affecting accounts for mail transportation; prepares the statistical

exhibits of mail service, and the reports of the mail lettings, giving a

statement of each bid; also of the contracts made, the new service

originated, the curtailments ordered, and the additional allowances

granted within the year.

The Finance-Office is in charge of the Third Assistant

Postmaster-General. To this office is assigned the supervision and

management of the financial business of the Department not devolved by

law upon the Auditor, embracing accounts with the draft offices and

other depositories of the Department; the issuing of warrants and drafts

in payment of balances, reported by the Auditor to be due mail

contractors and other persons; the supervision of the accounts of

offices under orders to deposit their quarterly balances at designated

points; and the superintendence of the rendition by postmasters of their

quarterly returns of postages. It has charge of the Dead-Letter Office,

of the issuing of postage stamps and stamped envelopes for the

prepayment of postage, and with the accounts connected therewith.

To the Third Assistant Postmaster-General all postmasters should direct

their quarterly returns; those at draft-offices, their letters reporting

quarterly the net proceeds of their offices; and those at

depositing-offices, their certificates of deposit. To him should also be

directed the weekly and monthly returns of the depositories of the

Department, as well as applications and receipts for postage stamps and

stamped envelopes, and for dead letters.

The Inspection-Office is in charge of a Chief Clerk. To this office is

assigned the duty of receiving and examining the registers of the

arrivals and departures of the mails, certificates of the service of

_route_-agents, and reports of mail failures; noting the delinquencies

of contractors, and preparing cases thereon for the action of the

Postmaster-General; furnishing blanks for mail registers and reports of

mail failures, providing and sending out mail bags and mail locks and

keys, and doing all other things which may be necessary to secure a

faithful and exact performance of all mail contracts.

All cases of mail depredation, of violations of law by private

expresses, or by the forging and illegal use of postage stamps, are

under supervision of this office, and should be reported to it. All

communications respecting lost money-letters, mail depredations, or

other violations of law, or mail locks and keys, should be directed to

“Chief Clerk, Post-Office Department.”

All registers of the arrivals and departures of the mails, certificates

of the service of _route_-agents, reports of mail failures, applications

for mail registers, and all complaints against contractors for irregular

or imperfect service, should be directed, “Inspection Office,

Post-Office Department.”

Benjamin Franklin was appointed General Deputy Postmaster of the

Colonies, in the year 1753, with a salary between him and his

confederates, of £600, if they could get it. This experiment brought him

in debt £900, and his success in expediting the mails, which he dwells

upon with so much satisfaction in his writings, will create a smile in

these days of electricity, steam, and “young-American” speed. In the

year 1754, he gave notice that the mail to New England, which used to

start but once a fortnight, in winter, should start once a week, all the

year, “whereby answers might be obtained to letters between Philadelphia

and Boston in three weeks, which used to require six weeks!”

Franklin was removed from his office by the British Ministry; but in the

year 1775, the Congress of the Confederation having assumed the

practical sovereignty of the Colonies, appointed a committee to devise a

system of post-office communication, who made a report recommending a

plan on the 26th of July, which on the same day was adopted, and Doctor

Franklin unanimously appointed Postmaster-General, at a salary of $1,000

per annum. The salary of the Postmaster-General was doubled on the 16th

of April, 1779, and on the 27th day of December, of the same year,

Congress increased the salary to $5,000 per annum.

An Inspector of Dead Letters was also appointed, at a salary of $100 per

annum, who was under oath faithfully and impartially to discharge the

duties of his office, and enjoined to take no copies of letters, and not

to divulge the contents to any but Congress, or to those who were

appointed by Congress for that purpose. Dr. Franklin, on the 7th of

November, 1776, was succeeded as Postmaster-General by his relative,

Richard Bache, who remained in office till the 28th of January, 1782,

when he was succeeded by Ebenezer Hazard, who was the last head of the

General Post-Office under the Confederacy.

In 1790, there were but seventy-five post-offices in the United States,

and but eighteen hundred and seventy-five miles of post _routes_.

The General Post-Office, in 1790, was located in New York, and Samuel

Osgood, of Massachusetts, was the first Postmaster-General under the

Federal Government. His conception of the duties of his office were,

doubtless, very humble, as he recommended “that the Postmaster-General

should not keep an office separate from the one in which the mail was

opened and distributed; that he might, by his presence, prevent

irregularities, and rectify any mistakes that might occur;” in fact, put

the Postmaster-General, his assistant, and their one clerk, in the city

post-office, to see that its mails were assorted and made up correctly.

The salary of Mr. Osgood was $1,500 per annum. Timothy Pickering was

appointed by Washington, August 12, 1791, at an increased salary of

$2,000. Joseph Habersham was the last Postmaster-General appointed by

Washington. He was commissioned April 22, 1795, at a salary of $2,400

per annum. The office was located in Philadelphia, in the year 1796, and

was established at Washington when the Federal Government was removed

there. In 1802, the United States ran their own stages between

Philadelphia and New York, finding coaches, drivers, horses, etc., and

cleared in three years over $11,000, by carrying passengers.

That sultry morning of August 25, 1814, when Admiral Cockburn and his

drunken crew, eager for fresh destruction, marched from Capitol Hill to

the War Office, which they burned, and from it down F street to treat

the Post-Office to the same fate, they found it on the site where its

marble successor now stands, and under the same roof the Patent-Office.

Says Charles J. Ingersoll, in his rambling history:

“Dr. Thornton, then Chief of the Patent-Office, accompanied the

detachment to the locked door of the repository, the key having been

taken away by another clerk watching out of night. Axes and other

implements of force were used to break in; Thornton entreating,

remonstrating, and finally prevailing on Major Waters, superintending

the destruction, to postpone it till Thornton could see Colonel Jones,

then engaged with Admiral Cockburn in destroying the office of the

_National Intelligencer_, not far off on Pennsylvania avenue. Colonel

Jones had declared that it was not designed to destroy private

property, which Dr. Thornton assured Major Waters most of that in the

Patent-Office was. A curious musical instrument, of his own

construction, which he particularly strove to snatch from ruin, with a

providential gust soon after, saved the seat of government from

removal, for want of any building in which Congress could assemble,

when they met in Washington three weeks afterwards. Hundreds of models

of the useful arts, preserved in the office, were of no avail to save

it; but music softened the rugged breasts of the least musical of

civilized people. Major Waters agreed, at last, to respite the patents

and the musical instrument till his return from Greenleaf’s Point,

where other objects were to be laid in ruins.”

But with the explosion of the magazine at Greenleaf’s Point, and the

tornado, both of which made unexpected havoc with the lives of the

British vandals, and their withdrawal under cover of night, they never

came back to the Patent and Post-Office, to destroy it. It was, I

believe, the only public building in the capital which escaped their

torch. It was, however, destroyed by fire, December 15, 1836.

One of the most precious treasures, now in the possession of the

Post-Office Department, is the original ledger of Doctor Benjamin

Franklin, Postmaster-General, 1776, which upon its title-page bears the

following record:

“This book was rescued from the flames, during the burning of the

Post-Office Building, on Thursday morning, Dec. 15, 1836, by W. W.

Cox, messenger of the office of the Auditor of the Treasury for the

Post-Office Department.”

This ledger is now on file in the office of the Auditor of the Treasury

for the Post-Office Department. Scorched and worn, it tells the story of

time and fate. It embraces all the accounts of all the post-offices of

the United States for the years 1776-77-78. These are all recorded in

the handwriting of Doctor Franklin, and do not cover one hundred and

twenty pages. The growth in the postal service may be partly measured by

the fact that its money record, kept by Benjamin Franklin, running

through eleven years, is equalled, at the present time, by the accounts

of two days. When the philosopher was at the head of the Post-Office

Department, there were eighty post-offices in the Confederation; there

are now thirty-two thousand post-offices in the United States, with the

number constantly increasing.

The Dead-Letter Office embodies more personal interest than any other in

the Post-Office Department. It is a spacious room, unique in outline,

many-windowed and well ventilated. It is surrounded by a wide gallery,

supported by spiral columns. An open iron staircase connects it with the

lower office. It is set apart for the woman’s work of this division.

They are far out-numbered by the men below, and yet in this narrow

gallery they are sadly crowded.

Spacious as the Post-Office is, in going thereto, the same conclusion is

forced upon one, which is apparent in every public building, that it is

already too small for the vast and rapidly increasing demands of the

public service. The gentlemen which you see at work below have nothing

to complain of in lack of light or air, but the ladies above say that

their little gallery is the escape valve to all the poisoned air below;

that their heads are so near the roof there is no chance for

ventilation, and that sudden death, among their number, has been caused

by the air-poison which pervades this gallery. The ladies need more room

for a new office; indeed, already they have overflowed the gallery and

are packed closely in the halls.

Meanwhile, in an imposing-looking apartment beneath them, sit their

brethren, on either side of the long table, opening the “dead-letters”

which they are to re-direct. I believe there are fourteen clergymen,

sitting at a single table, opening these letters. Preference is given to

gentlemen of this profession, broken in health or fortune, as it is

taken for granted that if they have lived to that age and fate, without

ever having committed a dishonest act, it is most unlikely that they

ever will—and that the treasure-letters are perfectly safe in their

keeping. Moreover, their profession is also in their favor. They must

have been unworldly-minded, says the reasoner, or they would never have

chosen to be clergymen. Nearly all are elderly men, and among the number

are a few old ones,—one, who has been in this office over fifty years, a

brother of its one time Postmaster-General, Amos Kendall—hair white as

snow—back bent over the table—hands trembling as he uses his knife—it is

his life to go on opening his quota of daily letters, for the pittance

of $1,200 per year. “If he were refused the privilege,” said an officer,

“he would die at once.”

[Illustration: DEAD LETTER OFFICE, U. S. GENERAL POST

OFFICE.—WASHINGTON]

In this office, from the thirty thousand post-offices in the United

States are received, annually, about three million five hundred thousand

dead-letters; unmailable letters, three hundred and sixty thousand;

blank letters, three thousand.

It seems impossible that three thousand persons, in a single year,

should post letters without a single letter traced on their envelopes;

nevertheless, this is true.

In one corner of this office stand two men, by an open door, whose

business it is to receive the dead-letters as they ascend to the office.

They come up on an elevator—tied up in immense bags. As they are tossed

out on the floor, one would suppose that they contained coffee for

merchandise, rather than heart-messages and treasures gone astray. The

bags are immediately opened and the letters transferred to the assorting

table, where they are classified by clerks. The foreign letters are

separated from the domestic, and any irregularity in their transmission

is noted. They are then counted, numbered and tied up into packages of

one hundred each, and thrown into bins, whence they are withdrawn in the

order of the date of their reception, and transferred to the opening

table to be _hari-karied_ by our clergymen.

Letters containing nothing, if possible, are returned to their writers.

If they cannot be, they are thrown into the waste-basket. This

waste-paper is not burned but sold—and averages to the Government a

revenue of about $4,000 per year. With all his extravagances, this is

but one of numerous ways by which Uncle Sam manages to turn an

economical penny out of the carelessness and misfortunes of nephews and

nieces.

Letters containing anything, of the smallest value, are saved and

registered under their different heads. Money, jewels, drafts,

money-orders, receipts, hair, seeds, deeds, military-papers,

pension-papers, etc., are all recorded and returned, if possible. A

“money letter” has five different records before it leaves the

Dead-Letter Office, and is so checked and counter-checked as to make

collusion or abstraction almost impossible, in case any soul who

surveyed it were fatally tempted.

When the opener of a letter finds money, he immediately makes a record

of it. The next morning, the head of “the Opening Table” records in a

book each letter found and recorded by each opener the day before. The

letters are then taken from a safe, in which they were locked the night

previous, and their contents recounted, to make sure of absolute

correctness, before leaving the Opening Table. The money-letters, with

the record of that day, are then handed over to the head of the Money

Branch, where the letters recorded by the head of the Opening Table are

certified and receipted. They are next indexed and delivered to the

several clerks of the Money Branch, each receipting every letter he has

recorded on the Index Book. He then records the letter and sends it to

the writer, through the postmaster of the place where the party lives.

The owner, on receiving the money, receipts for the same on a blank

accompanying the letter, which he sends back to the Dead-Letter Office.

The letters are again re-examined by two clerks, to see if the amounts

are correct, who conjointly scrutinize and seal the letters. They are

then registered to the different distributing offices, with all the

precautionary checks of a registered letter. In time, the letter or a

receipt from the owner, through the postmaster, is returned. If a

receipt is received, it is recorded, with date, as a final disposition

of the letter. If the money is returned, it is so noted and recorded on

a separate record kept for the purpose, that record showing,

perpetually, how much money is on hand. If not claimed at the end of

three months, the money is deposited in the Treasury of the United

States, subject to the application of the owner. By this minute and

exhaustive routine, every money-letter, and every cent which they

contain, is absolutely accounted for—traced, refunded, and held.

Drafts, deeds, checks, power-of-attorney and wills are recorded, and

sent through postmasters to their owners, they returning receipts for

the same.

Foreign letters are assorted, the amounts due this and other countries

recorded, and a system of accounts kept, showing, by a list returned

with the letters, a correct statement. Foreign letters are returned

weekly, to England, Germany and the Netherlands. The liberal postage

recently adopted by these countries has opened so large a

correspondence, it involves more frequent returns.

The Property-Branch is of a most miscellaneous character. It involves

the recording and returning of jewellery, and of almost every other

article under the sun. Many of these it is impossible to return. These

accumulate in such vast piles, it is necessary to dispose of them at

auction, at least, as often as once in four years.

At each sale, a complete catalogue of the articles is presented, and the

proceeds are deposited in the United States Treasury.

A room, leading from the Dead-Letter Office, lined with closed closets

to its lofty ceiling, is the receptacle of all these stranded treasures.

When the custodian unlocks their doors and you behold what is shut

within, you are lost in wonder as to what must be the conceived capacity

of the Post-Office in the minds of your compatriots. Before your eyes,

crammed into shelves, you see patchwork quilts, under garments, and

outer garments; hats, caps, and bonnets; shoes and stockings; with no

end of nicknacks and keepsakes; “sets” of embroidery, baby-wardrobes,

watches, and jewels of every description—though the greater proportion

is of the “fire-gilt,” “dollar-store” description. Many really beautiful

pictures are retained, because not sufficiently prepaid. Some of these,

sent as gifts, are left by the chosen recipients to be sold at

auction—the postage often amounting to far more than the value of the

picture. Many motley articles peer forth from their hiding-places

ignominiously “franked,” yet retained, the frank not being sufficient

legal-tender to insure their triumphal passage to the place of final

destination. Among these is an iron apple-parer.

Many of these cheap treasures were precious keepsakes from the hearts

which fondly sent them—under very unintelligible superscriptions—to

sweethearts whom they never reached. Some are tokens from beyond the

seas, which came from a far-off land only to find the one sought—dead or

living—gone, without a clue.

During the war, tens of thousands of photographs were thus sent astray.

The husband, the father, the brother, the son, under whose name they

came—alas! when they reached his regiment, he was not—the heaped-up

trench, the unknown grave, the unburied dead—somewhere amid them all—he

slept, and the memento of the love that lived for him, came back to this

receptacle of the nation, and here it is! On a stand near the window, is

an immense open book lined with photographs, all the photographs of

soldiers. With a tender hand, the Government gathered these pictures of

its lost and unknown sons and garnered them here, for the sake of the

living, who might seek their lost. Turning over the pages, we see many

empty spaces, and find that friends coming here and turning over the

pages of this book have identified the faces of loved ones who perished

in the war. Many of these are photographs of a poor character, (whose

transient chemicals are already fading out,) which were taken on the

field, and sent, by soldiers, home to mothers, wives, sisters and

sweethearts. The chances of war are sufficient to account for their

going astray of their objects and for their return here—where more than

one tear-blinded woman has sought and found them, at last.

To return to the dryer details of the Dead-Letter Office, we find that

all letters held for postage, all blank, unmailable, and hotel letters

pass through a like process with the dead-letter, with the exception of

the unmailable letters, which come directly from the office with written

lists, which are checked to see if the letters are all with the lists.

These the opener counter-checks, marking the contents both on letter and

list, to show that it was received and doubly opened. These lists, with

their letters, are sent to the Return Branch. Here they are returned to

their writers, and their lists are made to show the disposition of every

letter. These lists are carefully filed and subject to re-perusal. The

Return Branch, which is composed entirely of ladies, sends average

dead-letters back to their writers at the rate of seven thousand a day.

In this branch we find the application-clerk whose duty it is to trace

letters, and to send such information to persons applying for letters as

the records may show. In case of the loss of a valuable letter, the

Department spares no pains in its efforts to trace and find it.

The Postmaster-General, in one of his recent reports, says of this

branch of the Postal Service:

“In the examination of domestic dead-letters, for disposition,

1,736,867 were found to be either not susceptible of being returned,

or of no importance, circulars, etc., and were destroyed after an

effort to return them—making about 51 per cent. destroyed. The

remainder were classified and returned to the owners as far as

practicable. The whole number sent from the office was 2,258,199, of

which about 84 per cent. were delivered to owners, and 16 per cent.

were returned to the Department; 18,340 letters, containing

$95,169.52, in sums of $1 and upward, of which 16,061 letters,

containing $86,638.66, were delivered to owners, and 2,124, containing

$7,862.36, were filed or held for disposition; 14,082 contained

$3,436.68, in sums of less than $1, of which 12,513, containing

$3,120.70, were delivered to owners; 17,750 contained drafts, deeds,

and other papers of value, representing the value of $3,609,271.80—of

these 16,809 were restored to the owners, and 821 were returned and

filed; 13,964 contained books, jewellery, and other articles of

property, of the estimated value of $8,500—of these 11,489 were

forwarded for delivery and 9,911 were delivered to their owners;

125,221 contained photographs, postage-stamps, and articles of small

value, of which 114,666 were delivered to owners; 2,068,842 without

inclosures. Thus of the ordinary dead-letters forwarded from this

office, about 84 per cent. were delivered, and of the valuable

dead-letters (classed as money and minor) about 89 per cent. were

delivered. The decrease of money-letters received (about 3,000) is

probably owing to the growing use of money-orders for the transmission

of small sums.”

In August, 1864, Hon. Montgomery Blair appointed Dr. C. F. Macdonald,

now the Superintendent of the Money-Order Department, and J. M. McGrew,

now Chief Clerk of the Sixth Auditor’s office, commissioners to visit

Quebec and examine the workings of the Money-Order System which has been

in operation in Great Britain and Canada for several years.

The system, as used by the British Government, was modified and

simplified by the commissioners, and on the 8th of November, 1864, the

Money-Order System of the United States was inaugurated, with 138

offices authorized to issue and pay.

During the part of the fiscal year commencing November 8, 1864, and

ending June 30, 1865, there were 74,277 money-orders issued, amounting

to $1,360,122.52; during next fiscal year ending June 30, 1866—138,297,

amounting to $3,977,259.28; during next fiscal year ending June 30,

1867—474,496, amounting to $9,229,327.72; during next fiscal year ending

June 30, 1868—831,937, amounting to $16,197,858.47; during next fiscal

year ending June 30, 1869—1,264,143, amounting to $24,848,058.93; during

next fiscal year ending June 30, 1870—1,675,228, amounting to

$33,658,740.27; during the next fiscal year ending June 30,

1871—2,151,794, amounting to $42,164,118.03; during next fiscal year

ending June 30, 1872—2,573,349, amounting to $48,515,532.72.

During the present fiscal year, which expired June 30, 1873, the number

of orders issued will reach 3,000,000, and the amount will be over

$50,000,000.

The above figures, in themselves, contain the history of the money-order

system from its beginning to the present time. During the war one letter

was received at the Dead-Letter Office which contained $12,000. Rarely

now does any sum inside of an envelope amount to $50. As a rule, any sum

over $5 is sent by money-order—at least by all persons who have any

reasonable idea of what is absolutely safe.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

THE DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR—UNCLE SAM’S

DOMESTIC ARRANGEMENTS.

Inadequate Accommodation in Heaven—Defects of our Great Public

Buildings—The Public Archives—Valuable Documents in Jeopardy—Talk of

Moving the Capital—A Dissension of a Hundred Years—Concerning

Certain Idiots—A Day in the Patent Office—The Inventive Genius of

the Country—Aggressions of the Home Department—A Comprehensive Act

of Congress—Seven Divisions of the Department of the Interior—The

Disbursing Division—Division of Indian Affairs—Lands and

Railroads—Pensions and Patents—Public Documents—Division of

Appointments—The Superintendent of the Building—The Secretary of the

Interior and his Subordinates—Pensions and their Recipients—Indian

Affairs—How the Savages are Treated—Over Twenty-one Million of

Dollars Credited to their Little Account—The Census Bureau—A Rather

Big Work—The Bureau of Patents—What is a Patent?—A Self-supporting

Institution—A Few Dollars Over—The Use Made of a Certain Brick

Building—Secretary Delano—An Objection Against Him—How Wickedly he

Acted to the Women Clerks—“The Accustomed Tyranny of Men”—Cutting

Down the Ladies’ Salaries—Making Places for Useful Voters—A Sweet

Prayer for Delano’s Welfare—Something about Delano’s Face.

It has always been a mystery to me how Heaven could continue large

enough for all the people who are trying to get into it, that is, if the

human race is to keep on being born.

I am equally puzzled about the internal spaces of our great public

buildings. When designed, they were supposed to be ample for centuries

to come; but with the constant creation of new bureaus, and even of

departments, with the fast and never-ceasing accumulations of records in

every branch of the Government service, not a public building in

Washington is now large enough to hold the archives, or even the

_employés_ belonging to its own department. Already the city is filled

with temporary buildings, in which the overflow of the various

departments have taken refuge. Even now, every public building needs a

duplicate as large as itself to hold its treasures, and to carry on

fitly the intricate machinery of its routine service. The constant cry

of “Capital moving” has not only prevented this, but has caused the

precious records of the departments to be packed into precarious and

insufficient store-houses.

The public archives should all be stored in fire-proof buildings. The

destruction of the titles to all the lands in the country sold by the

Government would involve a loss greater than the cost of all Washington

city. And yet, as they are stored at present, any morning you may hear

that there is nothing left of them but ashes.

What madness to talk of moving the Capital! What idiots to breed another

dissension of a hundred years as to where another Capital shall be,

instead of making the most and best of the majestic one, bought at such

cost, that already is!

Well, a day in the Patent-Office has caused this outburst. This building

was built for the protection and display of the inventive genius of the

country. But that genius finds itself fearfully “cabined and confined,”

and almost crowded out by the elephantine proportions of the Home

Department, which needs, almost beyond any other, a vast building of its

own, all to itself. At first a single room was demanded for the

Secretary of the Interior. The needs of his department were such, he has

gone on annexing room after room of the noble Patent-Office, till its

“inventive genius” finds itself crowded into a very small corner of the

majestic building built with the proceeds of its own industry.

March 3, 1849, Congress passed an act to establish the Home Department,

and enacted that said new executive branch of the Government of the

United States should be called the Department of the Interior, and that

the head of said Department should be called Secretary of the Interior,

and that the Secretary should be placed upon the same plane with other

Cabinet officers.

This act transferred to the Secretary of the Interior the supervisory

power over the office of the Commissioner of Patents, exercised before

by the Secretary of State; the same power, over the Commissioner of the

General Land-Office, held previously by the Secretary of the Treasury;

the same over the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which had been under the

supervision of the Secretary of War; the same over the acts of the

Commissioner of Pensions, who had previously reported to the Secretary

of the Navy; also over the marshals and orders of taking and returning

the census, previously managed by the Secretary of State; the same over

accounts of marshals, clerks and officers of courts of the United

States, previously exercised by the Secretary of the Treasury. The same

act relieved the President of the duty of supervising the acts of the

Commissioner of Public Buildings, placing that gentleman under the

directions of the Interior Department; giving the Secretary control over

the Board of Inspectors and the Warden of the Penitentiary of the

District of Columbia.

Thus, you see, the Department of the Interior was made up, at the

beginning, of slices cut from each one of the other departments of the

Government. Subsequent acts of legislation have added new duties to the

Home Department. The Department of Justice; the Department of

Metropolitan Police; the accounts of marshals and clerks of the United

States Courts, and of matters pertaining to the judiciary; the

discontinuance of the office of Commissioner of Public Buildings, and

the assignment of his duties to the Chief Engineer of the Army, with the

duties and powers heretofore exercised by the Secretary of State over

the Governors and Secretaries of the various territories. All have been

transferred to the Department of the Interior. Admission of indigent

insane persons, resident in the District of Columbia, to the Insane

Asylum, also to the Columbia Institution for the deaf and dumb, and to

the National Deaf-mute College, and of blind children to the Columbia

Institution, all are only obtained through the Secretary of the

Interior.

The office of the Secretary of the Interior is divided into seven

divisions, as follows:

The “Disbursing Division,” through which all moneys, appropriated for

the entire service of the department, pass.

The Division of the Indian Affairs; having charge of matters pertaining

to the Indian office, and the various Indian tribes.

The Division of Lands and Railroads; having charge of matters pertaining

to the General Land-Office, and the construction, &c., of land-grant

railroads.

The Division of Pensions and Patents; having charge of matters

pertaining to those offices.

The Division of Public Documents; having charge of the distribution of

the public documents and the Department Library.

The Division of Appointments; having charge of all matters pertaining to

the force of the department, the preparing, recording, etc., of

Presidential appointments under the Interior Department.

The Superintendent of the building; having charge of all repairs, the

oversight of the laboring force, heating apparatus, etc.

The head of the Department is the Secretary of the Interior. His

subordinates are the Commissioners of the Public Lands, Patents, Indian

Affairs, and Pensions, and the Superintendent of the Census. The

Secretary is charged with the general supervision of matters relating to

the public lands, the pensions granted by the Government, the management

of the Indian tribes, the granting patents, the management of the

Agricultural Bureau, of the lead and other mines of the United States,

the affairs of the Penitentiary of the District of Columbia, the

overland-_routes_ to the Pacific, including the great Pacific Railways,

the taking of the Census, and the direction of the acts of the

Commissioner of Public Buildings, the Insane Hospital for the District

of Columbia, and the Army and Navy, is also under his control.

The first Secretary of the Interior was Thomas Ewing, of Ohio, appointed

by President Taylor; and Columbus Delano, of Ohio, is the present

Secretary.

The General Land-Office was established as a branch of the Treasury

Department by act of Congress, approved April 25, 1812, which authorized

the appointment of a Commissioner, at a salary of $3,000 per annum, and

the employment of a Chief Clerk, and such other clerks as might be

necessary to perform the work, at an annual compensation not to exceed,

in the whole, $7,000.

By the act of July 4, 1836, the office was reorganized and the force

increased. The number of clerks now employed is one hundred and

fifty-four; and even this force is not sufficient to meet the

requirements of a constantly growing business. Upon the creation of the

Interior Department, in 1849, the Land-Office was placed under its

jurisdiction.

The Commissioner of the General Land-Office is charged with the duty of

supervising the surveys of private land claims, and also the survey and

sale of the public lands of the United States. At present this

supervision extends to seventeen surveying districts and ninety-two

local land-offices.

The following table exhibits the progress of surveys and the disposal of

public lands since the fiscal year, ending June 30, 1861:

═══════════╤═══════════╤═════════╤════════════╤══════════╤═════════════

Fiscal Year│ Surveying │ Land │ Cost of │Number of │ Number of

ending │districts. │Offices. │ Survey. │ Acres │ Acres

June 30. │ │ │ │Surveyed. │Disposed of.

───────────┼───────────┼─────────┼────────────┼──────────┼─────────────

1862 │ 9 │ 58 │ $219,000 00│ 2,673,132│ 1,337,922.00

1863 │ 11 │ 54 │ 151,840 00│ 2,147,981│ 2,966,698.00

1864 │ 10 │ 53 │ 172,906 00│ 4,315,954│ 3,238,865.00

1865 │ 10 │ 53 │ 170,721 00│ 4,161,778│ 4,513,738.00

1866 │ 10 │ 61 │ 186,389 88│ 4,267,037│ 4,629,312.00

1867 │ 12 │ 62 │ 423,416 22│10,808,314│ 7,041,114.00

1868 │ 13 │ 68 │ 325,779 50│10,170,656│ 6,665,742.00

1869 │ 12 │ 66 │ 497,471 00│10,822,812│ 7,666,151.00

1870 │ 17 │ 81 │ 560,210 00│18,165,278│ 8,095,413.00

1871 │ 17 │ 83 │ 683,910 00│22,016,607│10,765,705.00

1872 │ 17 │ 92 │1,019,378 66│29,450,939│11,864,975.64

═══════════╧═══════════╧═════════╧════════════╧══════════╧═════════════

This shows an increase of the number of surveyors’ general from nine to

seventeen, and land-offices from fifty-eight to ninety-two, and an

increase in the annual survey from 2,673,132 acres to 29,458,939 acres,

and an increase in the number of acres disposed of from 1,337,932 to

11,864,975.64, for the year ending June 30, 1872.

The Land-Office audits its own accounts. It is also charged with laying

off land-grants made to the various railroad schemes by Congress. The

mines belonging to the Government are also in charge of this office.

The Commissioner of Pensions examines and adjudicates all claims arising

under the various and numerous laws passed by Congress, granting

bounty-lands or pensions for military and naval services rendered the

United States at various times. The Rebellion greatly increased the

pension list.

The Commissioner of Indian Affairs has charge of all the matters

relating to the Indian tribes of the frontier. The Government has at

sundry times purchased the lands of various tribes residing east of the

Mississippi River, and has settled the Indians upon reservations in the

extreme West. For some of these lands a perpetual annuity was granted

the tribes; for others, an annuity for a certain specified time; and for

others still, a temporary annuity, payable during the pleasure of the

President or Congress. The total sum thus pledged to these tribes

amounts to nearly twenty-one and a half millions. It is funded at five

per cent., the interest alone being paid to the tribes; this interest

amounts to over two hundred thousand dollars. It is paid in various

ways—in money, in provisions, and in clothing. The Commissioner has

charge of all these dealings with the savages.

Prior to Act of Congress of June 30, 1834, organizing the “Department of

Indian Affairs,” Indian matters were managed by a Bureau, with a

superintendent in charge, under the direction and control of the War

Department, and under the organization, the department or office

continued with the War Department, until March 3, 1849, when Congress

created the Department of the Interior, and gave the supervisory and

appellate power, exercised by the Secretary of War in relation to the

acts of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, to the Secretary of the new

department.

A “Commissioner of Indian Affairs” was first authorized by Act of

Congress, dated July 9, 1832, and the same law required the Secretary of

War to prescribe a new set of regulations as to the mode in which the

business of the Commissioner should be performed.

E. Herring was the first Commissioner, and his successors have been as

follows: C. A. Harris, appointed in 1836; T. H. Crawford, 1838; Wm.

Medell, 1845; O. Brown, 1849; L. Lee, 1850; G. W. Monypenny, 1853; J. W.

Denver, 1857; C. E. Mix, 1858; A. B. Greenwood, 1859; W. P. Dole, 1861;

D. N. Cooley, 1865; L. V. Bogy, 1866; N. G. Taylor, 1867; E. S. Parker,

1869; F. E. Walker, 1871; and E. P. Smith, 1873.

The Indian Department comprehended, under the new regulations provided

for by the law of July 9, 1832, four superintendencies, thirteen

agencies, and thirteen sub-agencies, having charge of about two hundred

and fifty thousand Indians, inhabiting some of the States west of the

Mississippi, and also what was then held to be “Indian Country,” defined

by the first section of the law of June 30, 1834, regulating trade and

intercourse with Indian tribes, to be “all that part of the United

States west of the Mississippi and not within the State of Missouri and

Louisiana, or the Territory of Arkansas, and, also, that part of the

United States east of the Mississippi River and not within any State to

which the Indian title has not been extinguished.”

By subsequent acquisition of territory from Mexico, the area of Indian

country became greatly extended, with a consequent large addition to the

Indian population within the jurisdiction of the Indian Department. In

the beginning of the current year, the Department consisted of eight

superintendencies, seventy agencies and special agencies, and three

sub-agencies. At present there are four superintendencies, four having

been abolished by act of Congress, February 14, 1873, providing in lieu

thereof five Indian Inspectors, whose duty it is to visit every

superintendency and agency, and examine into the affairs of the same, as

often as once or twice a year, and to report their proceedings;

sixty-eight agencies, nine special agencies and three sub-agencies, with

an Indian population, approximately, of 300,000, exclusive of those in

Alaska, estimated at between 50,000 and 75,000.

In the Indian service there is also a Board of “Indian Commissioners,”

nine in number, authorized by act of Congress, approved April 10, 1869,

men eminent for their intelligence and philanthropy, who serve without

compensation, the object of the Commission being to co-operate with the

President in efforts to maintain peace among the Indians, bring them

upon reservations, relieve their necessities, and to encourage them in

attempts at self-support.

The Census Bureau is now a permanent branch of the Department of the

Interior. It is in charge of a superintendent, and is assigned the duty

of compiling the statistics which constitute the Census of the Republic.

This enumeration is made every ten years. Some idea of the magnitude of

the task may be gained from the fact that the tabulation and publication

of the census of 1870 were not completed in January, 1873.

The Bureau of Patents is a part of the Department of the Interior, but

is in all its proportions and features so vast and imposing, that it is

almost a separate department, as, indeed, it must become erelong. It is

in charge of a Commissioner of Patents, who is appointed by the

President of the United States, by and with the advice and consent of

the Senate. It is intrusted with the duty of granting letters patent,

securing to the inventor the control of and the reward from articles

beneficial to civilization. It was formerly a part of the Treasury

Department, and is one of the best known branches of the Government.

Patents are not, as some persons suppose, monopolies, but are

protections granted to individuals as rewards for, and incentives to

discoveries and inventions of all kinds pertaining to the useful arts.

This Bureau is allowed to charge for these letters of protection only

the cost of investigating and registering the invention. It is a

self-supporting institution, its receipts being largely in excess of its

expenditures.

If you have traced the many Bureaus of the Interior Department thus far,

you have come to the conclusion that it needs a public building all to

itself, and that it should be an immense one. A large brick building

opposite the Patent-Office, on G street, is already exclusively occupied

by the Bureau of Education.

The present Secretary of the Interior is Hon. Columbus Delano, of Ohio,

a man who has been long in public life, first as Member of Congress from

Ohio, then as Commissioner of Internal Revenue, now as Secretary of the

Interior. I have but one objection to make to Mr. Delano in the position

which he now holds. He found twelve-hundred-dollar-positions in his

department filled, as they had been from the beginning, by women. He

degrades them to nine-hundred-dollar-clerkships, to make place for his

voters. Judging by the course he pursues, we may believe that he is of

the same opinion as the Secretary of the Treasury, that “four hundred

dollars per year are enough for any woman to earn,” unless she should be

a Delano! I hope that Ohio will reward him by not giving him the desire

of his heart and making him Senator, till he practices justice as the

supreme virtue of a public servant.

Columbus Delano has a face which nature never weakened by cutting it

down to absolute fineness, but added to its power by leaving it a little

in the rough. Iron-gray hair, shaggy eyebrows beetling over a pair of

straight-forward, out-looking gray eyes, make the more prominent

features of a face which you willingly believe in as that of a strong

and honorable man.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

THE PENSION BUREAU—HOW GOVERNMENT PAYS ITS

SERVANTS.

The Generosity of Congress to Itself—How Four Hundred Acts of Congress

were Passed—How Pensions have Increased and Multiplied—Sneering at

Red-Tape—The Division of Labor—Scrutinizing Petitions—A Heavy

Paper Jacket—The Judicial Division—Invalids, Widows, and

Minors—The Examiner of Pensions—The Difficulties of his

Position—Unsatisfactory Work—How Claims are Entertained and

Tested—What is Recorded in the Thirty Enormous Volumes—How many

Genuine Cases are Refused—One of the Inconveniences of

Ignorance—The Claim-Agent Gobbles up the Lion’s Share—An Extensive

Correspondence—How Claims are Mystified, and Money is Wasted—The

“Reviewer’s” Work—The “Rejected Files”—The “Admitted

Files”—Seventy-Five Thousand Claims Pending—Very Ancient

Claimants—The Bounty Land Division—The Reward of Fourteen Days’

Service—The Sum Total of what the Government has Paid in

Pensions—How the Pensions are Paid—The Finance Division—The

Largest and the Smallest Pension Office—The Miscellaneous

Branch—Investigating Frauds—A Poor “Dependent” Woman with Forty

Thousand Dollars—How “Honest and Respectable” People Defraud the

Government—The Medical Division—Examining Invalids—The

Restoration-Desk—The Appeal-Desk—The Final-Desk—The Work that Has

Been Done—One Hundred and Fifty Thousand People Grumbling—Letter

of an Ancient Claimant—The Wrath of a Pugnacious Captain.

Compared to the generosity with which it rewards itself, Congress doles

out most scanty recompense even to the Government’s most faithful and

long-suffering servants. Nevertheless, that it does not neglect or

ignore them altogether, the annals of the Pension Bureau accurately

attest.

The first Act promising pensions to those disabled by war, was passed in

the next month after the Declaration of Independence, August 26, 1776.

On September 16, 1776, specified grants of land were promised to those

who should enter the service, and continue to its close; and in case of

their death, to their heirs.

Under these early enactments, the mode prescribed by law, to decide who

were entitled to pensions, was to leave the State Legislatures to decide

who should justly receive pensions. Having decided, the State

Legislatures paid the pensioners, and were reimbursed by the general

Government.

Afterward, this method gave way to another, requiring the Judges of

district, and circuit-courts, to decide the equity of the demand, and to

pay it, as had formerly been done, by the Legislatures of the several

States. These payments were not made, however, until after the lists

reported by the Judges had been verified by comparison with the rolls on

file in the War Department, when they were reported by the Secretary of

War to Congress, and placed on the pension-lists, by a resolution of

that body. This mode was found to be too slow in detecting frauds, and

February 25, 1793, an Act was passed, prescribing rules to be observed

by the courts in the investigation of claims, and providing that the

evidence upon which the decision was based should accompany the report.

This Act prevailed, with slight modifications, until March 3, 1819, when

an Act was passed, authorizing the Secretary of War to place on the

pension-rolls, without reporting the lists to Congress.

This authority was exercised by the Secretary of War, until March 2,

1833, when a distinct Bureau of the Government was established for the

adjustment of pension claims. It was provided for in the section of a

bill, which made an appropriation for the civil and diplomatic expense

of the Government, for the year. This section said: “A Commissioner of

Pensions shall be appointed by the President and the Senate, who shall

receive a salary of twenty-five hundred dollars, which is hereby

appropriated.” This office was perpetuated for many years by biennial

enactments, the last providing that it should continue until further

legislation on the subject.