CHAPTER V

IN CONGRESS AND OUT. 1873-1878

T would be interesting if Burrows had recorded

IT

with undisguised frankness his first impressions of Congress when he once found himself a member of the Lower House. Years before, in the early Pennsylvania days, after the epoch-making experience of listening to Daniel Webster's speech and before he was ten years old, he had been discovered mounted on a stump back of the barn, delivering an oration. The derisive jeers from his brothers hurt his pride but failed to shake his confidence. "I don't embryo statesman reiterated between his sobs of mortification; "some day you will hear my voice in the halls of Congress.'

care,

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The Republican Party had been, and still was, his ideal. In his campaigning he had exaggerated its merits and minimized its weaknesses; and to do this over and over again inevitably resulted in having the brief which he presented to the people become welldefined in his own mind. Anticipation had now turned into realization,—but the Grand Old Party had sunk far below its early ideals. It was incom

petent and corrupt, and even its most loyal friend could not fail to recognize its decline nor to appreciate the certainty of impending rebuke at the hands of the people.

There is no question that Burrows did appreciate the situation to the fullest, even though he never gave voice to any such acknowledgment. It is impossible to believe other than that his high ideals were shocked, that his ever-present optimism was rudely shaken. Yet he would have told us, with a sincerity which no one could doubt, that nothing he observed weakened his belief in the Republican Party as an institution; that the very fact of its decline emphasized the need of loyalty on the part of all true Republicans; that its reform was inevitable, and that this reform could come only from within. He was a partisan always, but from conviction rather than from blindness to Party weaknesses. The Republican Party had drawn him into its ranks as a youth with a rekindled conscience, he had seen it preserve the Union and stamp out the curse of slavery. The Democrats, in his mind, were still unpurged of their disloyalty and lack of patriotism, and at their best were less to be trusted than the Republicans at their worst. One might say of Burrows as Thayer says of John Hay, who was obsessed by this same indomitable devotion to the Republican Party: "He was keen

enough to see that thick-and-thin partisanship appears illogical, not to say absurd, to the eyes of pure reason; he repudiated without demur this or that corrupt politician or Party act; but he held that an institution must be judged by its essentials and not by its details, especially when these are unworthy."

1

Some one once asked Burrows regarding the integrity of men in public life, and his answer was given with much feeling: "Public men," he declared, “are, with but few exceptions, honest, and are conscientiously trying to serve the public interest. If there are dishonest men in Congress they were dishonest before they came here, and the blame for their being in Washington rests with their constituents, who should have kept them at home. When an honest man is elected to Congress he will continue to be honest; a dishonest man will be the same in one place as in another."

The Forty-third Congress, of which Burrows now found himself a part, was perhaps less dishonest and less corrupt than its immediately preceding body, but this was due more to the wholesale respect inspired by the righteous indignation of their constituents throughout the Nation than to any real desire on the part of its members as a whole to institute a real reform. The Forty-third Congress was in itself a 1 Thayer: "The Life of John Hay," volume I, page 423.

remarkable body. It was presided over by James G. Blaine, and Benjamin F. Butler was the most conspicuous member on the floor. "Silver Dick" Bland, of Missouri, "Joe" Cannon, of Illinois, and Thomas C. Platt, of New York, like Burrows became members of the House at this same session. It was a powerful organization, but the Crédit Mobilier scandals, brought to light by the Congressional investigation in 1872, had left their taint upon certain of the members still holding their seats with full power and authority.

The Crédit Mobilier was an incorporated body through which all the profits received from contracts made for the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad accrued to the controlling stockholders. In 1867, certain financiers, led by Oakes Ames, a member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts, and holding a majority of the Union Pacific stock, awarded to themselves as controllers of the Crédit Mobilier the contract to build and equip a large portion of the road on conditions which guaranteed to them practically all the proceeds from the stock and bonds which the Union Pacific Railroad created. It was desirable to protect this scheme from Congressional interference, and to accomplish this Ames distributed at par a large amount of the stock of the Crédit Mobilier among his colleagues in Congress, placing this stock, as he frankly admitted, where it