same men who had insisted that the Government was derelict in not criminally prosecuting every man whose misconduct was established so as to make it necessary to turn him out of office, now turned round and, inasmuch as the jury had not found this man guilty of crime, demanded that he should be reinstated in office!  It is needless to say that the demand was not granted.  There were two or three other acquittals, of prominent outsiders.  Nevertheless the net result was that the majority of the worst offenders were sent to prison, and the remainder dismissed from the Government service, if they were public officials, and if they were not public officials at least so advertised as to render it impossible that they should ever again have dealings with the Government.  The department was absolutely cleaned and became one of the very best in the Government.  Several Senators came to me—­Mr. Garfield was present on the occasion—­and said that they were glad I was putting a stop to corruption, but they hoped I would avoid all scandal; that if I would make an example of some one man and then let the others quietly resign, it would avoid a disturbance which might hurt the party.  They were advising me in good faith, and I was as courteous as possible in my answer, but explained that I would have to act with the utmost rigor against the offenders, no matter what the effect on the party, and, moreover, that I did not believe it would hurt the party.  It did not hurt the party.  It helped the party.  A favorite war-cry in American political life has always been, “Turn the rascals out.”  We made it evident that, as far as we were concerned, this war-cry was pointless; for we turned our own rascals out.

There were important and successful land fraud prosecutions in several Western States.  Probably the most important were the cases prosecuted in Oregon by Francis J. Heney, with the assistance of William J. Burns, a secret service agent who at that time began his career as a great detective.  It would be impossible to overstate the services rendered to the cause of decency and honesty by Messrs. Heney and Burns.  Mr. Heney was my close and intimate adviser professionally and non-professionally, not only as regards putting a stop to frauds in the public lands, but in many other matters of vital interest to the Republic.  No man in the country has waged the battle for National honesty with greater courage and success, with more whole-hearted devotion to the public good; and no man has been more traduced and maligned by the wrong-doing agents and representatives of the great sinister forces of evil.  He secured the conviction of various men of high political and financial standing in connection with the Oregon prosecutions; he and Burns behaved with scrupulous fairness and propriety; but their services to the public caused them to incur the bitter hatred of those who had wronged the public, and after I left office the National Administration turned against