Clearfield Republican

REMARKS OF MR. DAWES OF MASS.

Mr. Dawes (rep.) of Massachusetts, addressed the House of Representatives on the 13th, on the conduct of the war, in which he told some very unpleasant truths. The fat contracts he speaks of are plainly attributable to the Secretary of War. Is it any wonder, then, that Gen. Cameron should find it convenient to retire from the Cabinet and take a trip to Europe?

Mr. Dawes then resumed his argument on the civil appropriation bill. He said:

There are eighty-three regiments of cavalry to-day, one thousand strong. It takes $250,000 to put one of these regiments on foot before it can move. Twenty millions of dollars have thus been expended on these cavalry regiments before they left the encampments where they were mustered into service. And hundreds and thousands of these horses have been condemned and sent back to Elmira and to Annapolis and to this city to spend the winter. Any day hundreds of them can be seen round the city of Washington, chained to trees, where they were left to starve to death. (Gangs of two hundred horses in various places have been thus left to die, and not till the committee on the District of Columbia have called for a measure of legislation to protect the city from the danger to be apprehended from this horse "Golgotha."

Besides the contracts for these horses, there are others for all the details of furnishing these regiments, in addition to the arms in the hands of the 600,000 soldiers in the field. Numerous outstanding contracts made with private individuals—not made upon advertisements—not made with the knowledge of the public—but made by members of Congress, who knew no more of the difference between one class of arms and another than does a Methodist minister.

There are outstanding contracts for the manufacture of Springfield muskets—the first one of which cannot be delivered in six months from this date. There is a contract for the supply of one million and ninety thousand muskets at $28 apiece, when the same quality of musket is manufactured at Springfield for $13 50 apiece. And an ex-member of Congress is now in Massachusetts trying to get machinery made by which he will be able to manufacture in some six months hence, at $21 apiece, those rifle muskets manufactured to day in that armory for $13 50. Providence before six months will dispose of this war, or He will dispose of us. Not one of those muskets thus contracted will be of the slightest service in this emergency, or before the providence of God, whether for good or for evil, will dispose of it.

He would ask his friends from the North and Northwest how they expect to benefit by an armory at Chicago, Rock Island and at Quincy, Ill., when a million and ninety thousand muskets will, according to the two contracts, be thrown upon the country, and that after the war is over, and at such an enormous price, in addition to other outstanding contracts for the manufacture, some time hence, of 372,000 Enfield rifles. Besides there are 75,543 sets of harness to be delivered by and by at the cost of one million nine hundred and seventy-eight thousand four hundred and forty-six dollars. He had not time to enumerate all these contracts.

When we appropriated at the last session of Congress for the purpose twenty million dollars, thirty-seven million and some thousands of dollars had been already pledged to contractors, not for the purchase of arms for the men in the field, not to protect those fighting the country's battles in this great emergency and peril, but for some future use

The riot of the 19th April in Baltimore opened this ball, and on the 21st of April, in the city of New York, there was organized a corps of plunderers of the treasury. Two millions of dollars were entrusted to a poor, unfortunate, honest, but entirely incompetent editor of a paper in New York, to dispense it in the best manner he could. Straightway this gentleman began to purchase linen pantaloons, straw hats, London porter, dried herrings and such like provisions for the army till he expended in this way $390,000 of the money, and then he got scared and quit—[Laughter.] There is an appropriation also for the supply of wood to the army. This contractor is pledged the payment of seven dollars a cord for all the wood delivered to the different commands—wood collected after the labor of the soldiers themselves had cut down the trees to clear the ground for their batteries, and this contractor employs the army wagons to draw it to the several camps and he has no further trouble to draw his seven dollars a cord, leaving the government to draw the wood. [Laughter.]

It costs two millions of dollars every day to support the army in the field. A hundred millions of dollars has thus been expended since we met on the second day of December, and all that time our army has been in repose. What the expenditure will increase to when that great day shall arrive when our eyes shall be gladdened with a sight of the army in motion he didn't know. And this hundred millions will go with the hundred more he had enumerated. Another hundred millions may be added to these before the 4th of March. What it may cost to put down the rebellion he cared very little, provided always that it be put down effectually.—But faith without works is dead, and he was free to confess that his faith sometimes fails him— he meant his faith in men—not his faith in the cause.

When the history of these times shall be written it will be a question upon whom the guilt will rest most heavily—upon him who has conspired to destroy, or upon him who has proved incompetent to preserve the institutions bequeathed to us by our fathers.

It is no wonder that the public treasury trembles and staggers like a strong man with too great a burden upon him. A strong man in an air-exhausted receiver is not more helpless to day than is the treasury of the government beneath the exhausting process to which it is subjected. The mighty monarch of the forest himself may hold at bay the fiercest and mightiest of his foes, while the vile cur, coming up behind him and opening his fangs, gives him a fatal wound, and although he may struggle on boldly and valiantly, the life-blood is silently trickling from his heart, and he is at last forced to loosen his grasp, and he grows faint, and falters and dies.

In conclusion he said it is impossible that the treasury of the United States can meet and continue to meet this state of things sixty days longer, and an ignominious peace must be submitted to unless we see to it that the credit of the country is sustained, and sustained too by the conviction going forth from this hall to the people of the country that we will treat as traitors not only those who are bold and manly enough to meet us face to face in the field of strife, but all those also who clandestinely and stealthily suck the life blood from us in the mighty struggle.