Treasury.  It was too great a temptation to the law-makers. $70,000,000 in a pile added to a reserve of $100,000,000 was an infamous lure.  I urged that this money should be turned back to the people to whom it belonged.  The Government had no more right to it than I had to five dollars of overpay, and yet, by over-taxation, the Government had done the same sort of thing.  This money did not belong to the Government, but to the people from whom they had taken it.  From private sources in Washington I learned that officials were overwhelmed with demands for pensions from first-class loafers who had never been of any service to their country before or since the war.  They were too lazy or cranky to work for themselves.  Grover Cleveland vetoed them by the hundred.  We needed the veto power in America as much as the Roman Government had required it in their tribunes.  Poland had recognised it.  The Kings of Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands had used it.  With the exception of two states in the Union, all the American Governors had the privilege.  Because a railroad company buys up a majority of the legislature there is no reason why a Governor should sign the charter.  There was no reason why the President should make appointments upon indiscriminate claims because the ante-room of the White House was filled with applicants, as they were in Cleveland’s first administration.  My sympathies were with the grand army men against these pretenders.

What a waste of money it seemed to me there was in keeping up useless American embassies abroad.  They had been established when it took six weeks to go to Liverpool and six months to China, so that it was necessary to have representation at the foreign courts.  As far back as 1866 it was only half an hour from Washington to London, to Berlin, to Madrid.  I have seen no crisis in any of these foreign cities which made our ambassadors a necessity there.  International business could be managed by the State Department.  The foreign embassy was merely a good excuse to get rid of some competent rival for the Presidency.  The cable was enough Minister Plenipotentiary for the United States, and always should be.  I regarded it as humiliating to the constitution of the United States that we should be complimenting foreign despotism in this way.

The war rage of Europe was destined to make a market for our bread stuff in 1886, but at the cost of further suffering and disaster.  I have no sentimentality about the conflicts of life, because the Bible is a history of battles and hand to hand struggles, but war is no longer needed in the world.  War is a system of political greed where men are hired at starvation wages to kill each other.  Could there be anything more savage?  It is the inoffensive who are killed, while the principals in the quarrel sit snugly at home on throne chairs.

A private letter, I think it was, written during the Crimean war by a sailor to his wife, describing his sensations after having killed a man for the first time, is a unique demonstration of the psychology of the soldier’s fate.