Springfield Weekly Republican

MR DAWES ON INFORMERS

One of the Speeches of the Session.-Did Gen Butler Like?

WHAT THE INFORMER IS.

Sir, who is the informer? He is to have half of the whole. The officials take the other half and divide it into three parts. His is the lion's share. Sir, the informer in every position of society, in every place, and in every calling, is an odious and despised being. Everybody shrinks from him, no matter what be his position or his calling. He that goes about making a business of informing against his neighbor so shocks the common sense of justice, decency, and honor in all mankind, that he is universally despised. But let him do it for pay: let it be understood that he goes up and down the earth paid to inform against his fellow-men, and the intensity of the feeling of hatred with which he is regarded and the feeling that he ought to be hunted around the earth is increased ten-fold. Add to that that he is to have half of what may be made out of his informing. He is bad enough when he volunteers without compensation from any motives of malice or otherwise to inform against his neighbor: he has no place whatever in decent society. But when he does it for pay, much more when he is to have half of the proceeds of his cursed employment, the door of decent society ought to be and will be shut against him.

The leper may be tolerated among men, for his leprosy is his misfortune. The man that carries about him a loathsome disease, that is not his fault but his misfortune, engages the charity of the world to build a hospital for him and to care for him with pity and compassion. But the vile, festering, putrescent informer, who goes about the earth assured of one-half of what he can make by his informing, finds no place as yet where decent men will harbor or countenance or associate with him.

THE GOVERNMENT AN ACCOMPLICE.

Shall the government of the United States take the wages of his sin and his iniquity and divide it with him? It is he who is the last refuge of this system. One after another they let go, or give up and throw overboard, and say, We will not defend them. We will not defend an official, appointed by the government perhaps for his good character and under the control of the government in his actions, subject to removal if he abuses his trust; no, we are willing to say that he shall not have this; but the man who is under no control, the volunteer who cuts himself loose thereby from society, without either calling or position, forfeiting by the very willingness to take this every other position of trust and confidence-it seems it is thought best that we should save him, it seems best that we should save and guard him by new legislation, that he may have one-half or one-quarter, it may be, of all fees and penalties and forfeitures. We guard this man, roving around among the merchants of the cities of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, with money enough, the fruits and promises of his success, to enable him to furnish the means that will invade the confidential relations that exist between the merchant and his clerks, tainting the most sacred trusts, lying in wait for the unwary, as it was shown before the committee on ways and means, at the desk of the custom-house, and, seeing the merchant unwittingly put in his foot, by omitting, it may be by accident or by ignorance or by any of a thousand ways consistent with his honesty, to conform to the most complicated system of revenue laws that exists in the world-standing, I say, at the desk, and seeing the merchant from day to day openly and unconscious of anything wrong making mistakes in his invoices, with a law behind him which says that a mistake in one item forfeits the whole invoice, and then, when they are piled up by the dozen upon the desk of the custom-house, going and informing against him and getting one-quarter of the forfeitures! And if the merchant appeals, under that law, to the collector of the port, the law makes that collector the appellate court. If he decides that this man has innocently, without intention, been simply guilty of a technical neglect, he lets him go, and he does not himself get anything. But if he decides that the merchant is guilty, he gets one-quarter. The court that this law has provided for the merchant to appeal to, to decide whether or not he has conformed to the law, has one-half of all the penalties if he decides that the man violated the law, and if he decides that he has not so done, he does not have anything. The district-attorney, who is put there as the officer of the government in a semi-judicial character to see that justice is done between the government and the accused, gets 2 per cent of all, and the informer gets what I have told you.

OTHER COUNTRIES HAVE DISPENSED WITH HIM.

This is the law that was brought to the attention of the committee on ways and means, and as a substitute for which they have reported this bill. It is a law that has passed away in other countries, has had its day. The informer is not known in the British customs service now. The customs officer in the British customs service is not tempted in the administration of the law by any bribe. He is paid a fair salary, as ours should be. He is held to his official integrity and efficiency, and that the government exacts of him and for that it pays him. Now, is there anything in our law that renders it impracticable for us to treat with the merchants of New York and of Boston and of Philadelphia and of San Francisco as honest men, until they are shown to be dishonest men? Is there anything in their calling, is there anything in their character, is there anything in the nature of their business, or in our relation to them, in custom, not in law-there is enough in our laws-but is there anything in the nature of it that renders it impossible for us to administer the laws upon them and with them as we do with other people?

THE CUSTOMS SERVICE DEBAUCHED.

Through the portals of the ports of New York and of Boston enters seven-eighths of the commerce of the country, and consequently seven-eighths of all the wealth that comes to our shores in the vessels that plow the deep, and whiten every ocean with their sails. They are, some of them, styled contemptuously before the committee "merchant princes." Some of them have become such by industry and frugality and fidelity to business relations with everybody else certainly but the government. Some of them are young and enterprising men, beginning without capital, and growing by devotion to an honorable calling, most honorable in all nations and all ages of the world, up to a competency and an independence, and to command the respect of mankind wherever they are known. What in their characters, what in their lives, what in their dealings with their fellow-men, that should lead us to infer that, in their dealings with the government of the United States, there is any such mysterious and malign spell upon them that we cannot fix our laws so plainly and the machinery for their execution so simple that they, as others, can walk into our courts and feel that, whether the judgment be for, or against them, that judgment is a righteous and a just one, commanding their respect as well as their obedience? On the other hand, this very system itself has just precisely the opposite effect. It teaches merchants to devise means of evading the law and the administration of it. The result is to drive high-minded and high-toned merchants out of business, and their places are taken by that class who take their chance in the world, even by a violation of the law for the profit which in the long run they think it will yield, or it drives the importing business of this country into the hands of foreigners, who from the other side of the water send their goods here to irresponsible consignees who have nothing to lose and therefore nothing to fear. Such is the result fast coming to be the common law in the mercantile community of this country, under the system this bill hopes to remedy. The wise, prudent man is seeking some other calling or absolute retirement rather than submit himself to the chances of accident and mistake that are