nize two things: the first is that everybody has a right to petition, and the next is that almost everybody will sign any petition that is thrust in their face. Certainly everybody along any mail route will sign any petition which looks to the idea of an increase of mail service, provided it is not to be done at their expense, but at the expense of somebody else. We would all of us like mail service if we happened not to live in a city. We would like to have the mail come by our door at least two or three times a day, and would deem ourselves perfectly justified in honestly signing a petition urging the Second Assistant PostmasterGeneral to make arrangements of that kind. We understand perfectly well that the Second Assistant Postmaster-General, when one of those petitions comes to him, if he is an honest and efficient officer, will say: "This seems to me to represent the wishes of the people along the route. They state what they want entirely without regard to the claims of other localities upon the money which Congress has appropriated. Their statement is made without regard to the question as to who is to pay the expense. They are frequently, almost always, without any knowledge of what the increased expense will be. Now I, as an honest Second Assistant Postmaster General, will look the field over. I have these petitions, which I assume to be genuine"-Ishall show you directly that he had no business to assume that "and to represent the wishes of the people. Now ought they to be granted? What is the productiveness of this route? What is its character? Through what part of the country does it run? What is the population there? What justification have I for taxing the people of the East to give daily mail service at a high rate of speed along a route in a Western Territory where twenty-one days out of thirty-nine there does not pass a letter over the route?" I shall show you such a case as this, gentlemen, and yet there were petitions in favor of expedition on that route. His duty, we submit to you, as an honest Second Assistant Postmaster General, in view of these petitions, was to look the field over and to decide what ought fairly and properly to be done. He ought to have said with regard to the case I last mentioned, "This I cannot do; it is absurd to pay $20,000 or $30,000 for increase of either trips or speed when there is no mail matter going over the route; I cannot do it, it makes no difference who comes to me urging it." It will be contended, and it is undoubtedly a fact, that members of Congress and Senators signed papers urging an increase. They were representing their locality. They were representing the interests of their constituents. But we shall show to you that at least one United States Senator urging such increase was the paid agent of these defendants.

Mr. HENKLE. Who was that?

Mr. BLISS. I will show you if you dare to put him on the stand.

[Mr. Chandler made a remark in an undertone which was inaudible

to the reporter.]

Mr. BLISS. [To Mr. Chandler.] What do you say?

Mr. HENKLE. He says you should give his name.

Mr. BLISS. I have not given the names of any witnesses so far, and I do not propose to pick him out and give his name. He will get notoriety enough when he comes, if he comes. I simply say we propose to show it. But I will further say that I do not believe he will come. Mr. CHANDLER. Was he here before?

Mr. BLISS. I will not specify him. Senators would come and Members would come, or they would sign petitions or do something of that sort, and Mr. Brady

Mr. CHANDLER. [Interposing.] If your honor please, I wish to ask

:

whether it is proper for Mr. Bliss to go on and argue the case now. We have listened here for at least twenty minutes to an argument pure and' simple as distinct from a statement of the facts which he proposes

The COURT. I understand this to be an anticipatory statement of the facts.

Mr. CHANDLER. No, your honor; it is an argument as to what is the duty of the Second Assistant Postmaster-General. It is not a statement of what Mr. Bliss is going to prove, but it is a statement of what he would do and how he would manage were he himself in this high office-if it should ever be his fortune to reach it.

Mr. BLISS. Misfortune.

Mr. CHANDLER. I do not think it is proper for him so to proceed. He is not upon facts.

The COURT. He is applying the facts which he expects to prove.

Mr. BLISS. [Resuming.] Then again on the other side, gentlemen, as to petitions, we shall claim to you that while these defendants had a perfect right to get up petitions they had not a right to resort to deception of Government officers in getting them up. They had not a right to direct petitions to be gotten up by one man but not to be in the same form, because that fact might show that it was a mere bogus piece of business. They had not the right to do that. They had a perfect right to represent the case to the Postmaster General and to seek to get from him increase or expedition, looking out for their own interests as we all do. But they had not the right, unless they wanted to get themselves into trouble, to go into a system of deception in connection with these petitions. They had not the right to alter petitions or to present petitions with forged or altered names. Now let me tell you, as to the petitions, that we shall present to you a witness who will tell you of Mr. Brady's declaration that they were a mere sham and pretense, intended to cover and protect him, and that was all there was in them. Take for instance the route from Kearney to Kent. On that route we have this remarkable condition of affairs: The people desired an increase of trips. They did not care for an increase of speed. A petition was sent from here by one of these defendants, Miuer, I think, for circulation to parties on the route, asking for an increase of trips. The petition was circulated a little, and then by a careless accident an inkstand was upset upon it which blotted it so badly that the party to whom it was sent would not return it. So he himself wrote, or got a friend to write, another petition, which was a precise copy of the first. That petition contained no word about an increase of speed. It contained only a request for an increase of trips. It was generally signed and sent here and there was obtained upon it the indorsement of a United States Senator. The petition was filed in the Post Office Department, but before it was filed there was inserted in it in an entirely different handwriting, at the end of a paragraph where there was a blank space on the line, the words, "And thirteen hours," so as to make it a petition not only for an increase of trips, but for an increase of speed; yet that alteration would almost stare a blind man in the face, and was obvious to everybody. There was not another paper on file in the department which said anything about increase of speed except the affidavit of one of these defendants in favor of it and stating the number of men and horses. There was not a paper of any kind with reference to increase of speed in the department except the affidavit and this altered petition taken by Mr. Brady as his sole authority for ordering an increase of

speed, which took from the Treasury a large number of thousand dollars. We shall place before you the man to whom that petition was sent, the man who wrote the petition to take the place of the blotted paper, the man who returned it here. We will place before you some of the people who signed it. All will say to you that there never was on that petition, up to the time it was sent here to one of these defendants, a sug gestion of any increase of speed-that the words were added here by one of these defendants. I think we shall be able to show you who added them. We shall be uncharitable enough, gentlemen, in that connection to ask you to believe that if the petition originally sent West had not been so destroyed by being blotted, but had come back here, the words "And thirteen hours," if added, would have been added in the handwriting of the petition and the ear-marks of the fraud would not be so obvious.

There are other routes upon which the same sort of business was done. There are petitions where the words "faster time" are interlined and various things of that sort more or less obvious upon them, all either over erasures or in different and easily distinguishable handwriting. In one case we shall show you this: There were two routes, one from Mineral Park to Pioche, the route over which there were no letters passing, as I have already told you, and the other from Mineral Park to Ehrenberg. Both routes terminated at Mineral Park. Mr. Brady ordered expedition on both of those routes, and he ordered it upon petitions which bear on their face the evidence that they were not prepared for use as applicable to those routes. The terminus of the route and the territory in which it is situated are altered on each of those petitions and the signatures to the petitions are the same. The petitioners state that they get mail matter along that route. The names are identical. And yet the fifty or sixty names I believe you will be satisfied from inspection were all written by not exceeding six or seven persons. The same names are on both petitions, both petitions are altered, and both petitions are so altered that the most casual examination will indicate that they could not have been intended to apply to the route to which they are made to apply. Mr. Brady used both of those petitions as his basis for making orders which took from the Treasury large sums of money for expedition. And that, gentlemen, ought to dispose of the subject of petitions. Why, there is not "cover" enough in them to protect Brady in an indictment for indecent exposure.

As to these petitions, there are some other things that I desire to call to your attention. The route from Bismarck to Tongue River runs through the region where General Custer was killed. It was 301 miles long, and over the whole length there was not a person living; there was not a cabin. The Indians roamed over it so freely that after Mr. Miner had entered into a contract to run the route for $2,350 a year, which was very much less than the work could be done for, he came in and filed all sorts of petitions to show that it was impossible to run the mail over the route without a company of soldiers to protect the mail carrier from Indians; that there was no mail matter and no necessity for the route anyway; yet, within sixty days afterwards, this same Mr. Miner was coming in with affidavits alleging that the country was so full of people, that they were so intelligent, and that they wanted mail facilities so much that there was great need for expedition and increase; and I think before he got through he ran the original sum of $2,350 a year up to $70,000 a year. When they commenced on that route they had to send a party out to build their stations. They employed a man whom we shall place before you, a sturdy, respectable,

and well-to-do contractor of considerable means and large experience, to go over the route with a party of twelve or fifteen men and build a station every seventeen miles. They sent there to superintend_the business at different times John W. Dorsey and Mr. Rerdell. Mr. Rerdell, as the representative of these parties, went to the contractor, Mr. Pennell, and said to him, "I want you to take your gang of men and have them sign a petition stating that they are residents of a town or settlement which is some forty or fifty miles north of our line, and that they want mail service from their residence down to our line, and recommend that one of your gang be made the postmaster at this supposititious place, and we will get an order to have the service put on and will get pay for it." The contractor was too honest a man to do any thing of that kind, but the proposition shows what these parties were doing and how they were getting up petitions.

We shall show to you, gentlemen, on one route a petition for an increase of service in Oregon, which petition occupies half a sheet of foolscap paper, coming down to within three or four lines of the end of the paper. There are then some three or four names, and then there are pasted on to it several sheets of signatures of people. We shall show to you that every one of those signers lived in Utah, more than a thousand miles from this route, and had no connection with it in any way, but that the names pasted on to that petition were signed for an entirely different purpose, and being in the petition mill of these contractors they were undoubtedly taken from the heading where they were originally placed, attached to this piece of paper, and made to do service as a petition of citizens living along the Oregon route, recommending expedition and increase of service, when in point of fact none of the men lived within a thousand miles of the route. I doubt whether any of the signers ever heard of either terminus or of any post-office on the route. We shall show you another case where the petition that came here was a petition asking for a reduction to thirty-six hours as the schedule time, and yet that the affidavit of the contractos is an affidavit, looking to a reduction to twenty-six hours; and we shall show you that Mr. Brady promptly made the order reducing the time to twenty-six hours, and providing for the paying of a large sum of money into the contractor's pocket by the reduction. When the order got out into the locality the postmasters, contractors, and everybody said "this cannot be intended; we do not want a twenty-six-hour schedule; it is an absurdity; we have not asked for it; it does not improve our connections or benefit us at all; there must have been some mistake of a copyist or something of that sort." So they performed the service in thirty-six hours for weeks, thinking they were doing everything they ought to do, but they finally found out that Mr. Brady, in the beneficence of his generosity, had chosen to reduce the service over the route ten hours less than any petition had asked for, and that the only man who ever mentioned the time of twenty-six hours as desired upon that route was the contractor here in Washington, who made affidavits as to the number of men and horses that would be needed to carry the mail in twentysix hours, and yet who had no knowledge on the subject. I may say in passing that the affidavit was a gross misstatement.

Now, Mr. Brady did not do these things ignorantly. He did them after remonstrance in many cases. For instance, on the route from Pueblo to Rosita Mr. Brady was informed by a Mr. Magrue on the 30th of August, 1878, that a petition was being circulated for three trips; that the mail did not go over that Rosita route, and that it went by railroad. On the following 17th of March the postmaster at Green

wood, the only intermediate station, advised the discontinuance of the service on the route, on the ground that the mail could be carried quicker and better in another way. Yet, on the 8th of July, 1879, three months after the remonstrance of the postmaster, Mr. Brady, in disregard of this notice, and disregarding the suggestion that the route be abandoned entirely, increased the trips from one to six times a week, and reduced the time from fifteen hours to ten hours, increasing the pay, which was originally $388, to $8,148. That is the route on which I told you that the subcontractor, by his contract on file, was to perform the service for $3,100, for which Mr. Brady, in spite of the remonstrance of the postmaster, had agreed to pay $8,148, and the subcontractor had so good a thing of it that he let it out to somebody else for $2,600. Mr. Brady insisted on paying the contractors on this route about $6,000 for doing nothing.

On the 8th of May, 1880, the postmaster at Greenwood, by this time another man-there had been a change in the office-advised the discontinuance of the service on that route, and stated that in so advising he had the concurrence of the postmasters at Rosita and at Pueblo, which offices were all the offices upon the line, and that the route be supplied in a different way. Mr. Brady not only paid no attention to that advice, but I think he went on and made a further increase upon the route.

On route 38135, from Saint Charles to Greenhorn, the postmaster at Pueblo called attention to the fact that the route as advertised ended at a pump; that there was no town and no reason for its ending where it did; and that the proper terminus of the route should be Pueblo. Mr. Brady's attention was called to that fact before the contract was let; was called to it by one of his own post-office inspectors. He went on and let the contract to Saint Charles, and then there was a temporary arrangement made by which they got the mail from Pueblo to Saint Charles. Then Mr. Brady extended the service to Pueblo; but after he had extended it the route was just as long as it was advertised at. He had not lengthened it a particle. The mistake had been made in the advertisement. By some mistake or other they had inserted Saint Charles when they should have inserted Pueblo, though they gave the correct distance to Pueblo. Yet Mr. Brady added twelve miles, I think it was-an alleged twelve miles, a fictitious twelve miles-to that route from Saint Charles to Pueblo, gave the contractor for carrying the mail an increased allowance on that twelve miles, made that increased allowance largely more than his own records showed the mail was being carried for over those twelve miles under a temporary service. And then having done that, and having got his route well extended to Pueblo and got it in good shape for expedition, he made an order for expedition and gave to the contractor a large sum of money for making expedition, and then arranged a schedule by which the mails arrived at Pueblo (Pueblo being a large railroad station) just after the trains left, and they laid over there a good many more hours than he had saved time by his pretended expedition.

On the route from Ojo Caliente to Parrott City I have already called your attention to the fact that Mr. Brady insisted upon having a schedule of impossible time when his postmasters told him it could not be done in that time. He insisted upon having it done.

On the route from Rawlins to White River, in Wyoming, the postmaster at White River, on the 22d of January, 1879, wrote to him saying that the time of five days ought to be made 66 hours in winter and 56 hours in summer. Yet on the 1st of May, 1879, four or five months after