These charges on being signed by Hastings were presented to Congress by Julian; and at his request they were referred to the Judiciary Committee.  That committee investigated them, considered the whole affair a farce, and paid no further attention to it.  But the next year Mr. Holman, of Indiana, who succeeded Julian, the latter having failed of a re-election, re-introduced Hastings’ memorial at Julian’s request and had it referred to the Judiciary Committee, with express instructions to report upon it.  Hastings appeared for the second time before that committee and presented a long array of denunciatory statements, in which Judge Hoffman, myself, and others were charged with all sorts of misdemeanors.  The committee permitted him to go to any length he pleased, untrammelled by any rules of evidence; and he availed himself of the license to the fullest extent.  There was hardly an angry word that had been spoken by a disappointed or malicious litigant against whom we had ever decided, that Hastings did not rake up and reproduce; and there was hardly an epithet or a term of villification which he did not in some manner or other manage to lug into his wholesale charges.  As a specimen of his incoherent and wild ravings, he charged that “the affairs of the federal courts for the District of California were managed principally in the interests of foreign capitalists and their co-conspirators, and that the judges thereof appeared to be under the control of said foreign capitalists, and that the said courts and the process thereof were being used or abused to deprive the government of the United States and the citizens thereof of the property that legally and equitably belonged to them respectively, and to transfer the same, in violation of law and through a perversion of public justice, to said foreign capitalists and their confederates and co-conspirators, and that nearly the whole of the sovereign powers of the State were under the control and management of said foreign capitalists and their confederates and co-conspirators;” and he alleged that he “was aware of the existence in the United States of a well-organized, oath-bound band of confederated public officials who are in league with the subjects of foreign powers, and who conspire against the peace, prosperity, and best interests of the United States, and who prey upon and plunder the government of the United States and the city and county governments thereof, and also upon private citizens, and who now are carrying into practice gigantic schemes of plunder through fraud, usurpation, and other villainy, in order to enrich themselves, bankrupt the nation, and destroy our government, and that their power is so great that they can and do obstruct the administration of public justice, corrupt its fountains, and paralyze to some extent the sovereign powers of the government of the United States and the people thereof.”  The Judiciary Committee after having patiently listened to this rigmarole, absurd