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can 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,
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