This was too much.This was the feather that broke the clerical camel's back.I said, "Sir, do you suppose that I am going to work for six dollars a day? If that is the idea, let me recommend the Senate Committee on Conchology to hire somebody else.I am the slave of no faction! Take back your degrading commission.Give me liberty, or give me death!"From that hour I was no longer connected with the government.Snubbed by the department, snubbed by the Cabinet, snubbed at last by the chairman of a committee I was endeavoring to adorn, I yielded to persecution, cast far from me the perils and seductions of my great office, and forsook my bleeding country in the hour of her peril.
But I had done the state some service, and I sent in my bill:
The United States of America in account with the Hon.Clerk of the Senate Committee on Conchology, Dr.
To consultation with Secretary of War............$50To consultation with Secretary of Navy...........$50To consultation with Secretary of the Treasury...$50Cabinet consultation...................No charge.
To mileage to and from Jerusalem, via Egypt, Algiers, Gibraltar, and Cadiz, 14,000 miles, at 20c.a mile.............$2,800To salary as Clerk of Senate Committee on Conchology, six days, at $6 per day...........$36Total..........................$2,986
--[Territorial delegates charge mileage both ways, although they never go back when they get here once.Why my mileage is denied me is more than Ican understand.]
Not an item of this bill has been paid, except that trifle of thirty-six dollars for clerkship salary.The Secretary of the Treasury, pursuing me to the last, drew his pen through all the other items, and simply marked in the margin "Not allowed." So, the dread alternative is embraced at last.Repudiation has begun! The nation is lost.
I am done with official life for the present.Let those clerks who are willing to be imposed on remain.I know numbers of them in the departments who are never informed when there is to be a Cabinet meeting, whose advice is never asked about war, or finance, or commerce, by the heads of the nation, any more than if they were not connected with the government, and who actually stay in their offices day after day and work! They know their importance to the nation, and they unconsciously show it in their bearing, and the way they order their sustenance at the restaurant--but they work.I know one who has to paste all sorts of little scraps from the newspapers into a scrapbook--sometimes as many as eight or ten scraps a day.He doesn't do it well, but he does it as well as he can.It is very fatiguing.It is exhausting to the intellect.
Yet he only gets eighteen hundred dollars a year.With a brain like his, that young man could amass thousands and thousands of dollars in some other pursuit, if he chose to do it.But no--his heart is with his country, and he will serve her as long as she has got a scrapbook left.
And I know clerks that don't know how to write very well, but such knowledge as they possess they nobly lay at the feet of their country, and toil on and suffer for twenty-five hundred dollars a year.What they write has to be written over again by other clerks sometimes; but when a man has done his best for his country, should his country complain? Then there are clerks that have no clerkships, and are waiting, and waiting, and waiting for a vacancy--waiting patiently for a chance to help their country out--and while they, are waiting, they only get barely two thousand dollars a year for it.It is sad it is very, very sad.When a member of Congress has a friend who is gifted, but has no employment wherein his great powers may be brought to bear, he confers him upon his country, and gives him a clerkship in a department.And there that man has to slave his life out, fighting documents for the benefit of a nation that never thinks of him, never sympathizes with him--and all for two thousand or three thousand dollars a year.When I shall have completed my list of all the clerks in the several departments, with my statement of what they have to do, and what they get for it, you will see that there are not half enough clerks, and that what there are do not get half enough pay.
HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF
The following I find in a Sandwich Island paper which some friend has sent me from that tranquil far-off retreat.The coincidence between my own experience and that here set down by the late Mr.Benton is so remarkable that I cannot forbear publishing and commenting upon the paragraph.The Sandwich Island paper says:
How touching is this tribute of the late Hon.T.H.Benton to his mother's influence:--'My mother asked me never to use tobacco; I have never touched it from that time to the present day.She asked me not to gamble, and I have never gambled.I cannot tell who is losing in games that are being played.She admonished me, too, against liquor-drinking, and whatever capacity for endurance I have at present, and whatever usefulness I may have attained through life, I attribute to having complied with her pious and correct wishes.When I was seven years of age she asked me not to drink, and then I made a resolution of total abstinence; and that I have adhered to it through all time I owe to my mother."I never saw anything so curious.It is almost an exact epitome of my own moral career--after simply substituting a grandmother for a mother.How well I remember my grandmother's asking me not to use tobacco, good old soul! She said, "You're at it again, are you, you whelp? Now don't ever let me catch you chewing tobacco before breakfast again, or I lay I'll blacksnake you within an inch of your life!" I have never touched it at that hour of the morning from that time to the present day.
She asked me not to gamble.She whispered and said, "Put up those wicked cards this minute!--two pair and a jack, you numskull, and the other fellow's got a flush!"I never have gambled from that day to this--never once--without a "cold deck" in my pocket.I cannot even tell who is going to lose in games that are being played unless I deal myself.
When I was two years of age she asked me not to drink, and then I made a resolution of total abstinence.That I have adhered to it and enjoyed the beneficent effects of it through all time, I owe to my grandmother.
I have never drunk a drop from that day to this of any kind of water.