Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/221

Your next charge is equally portentous. It is that I committed the crime of asking the Attorney-General for legal advice in a case on which the Attorney-General's opinion did not agree with your own. This accusation is sufficiently preposterous in itself but the circumstances of the case serve to show its venom. In 1875 Justice Davis, of the Supreme Court, delivered in the Leavenworth, Lawrence and Galveston Railroad case, an opinion which could be interpreted as restricting in a certain way the right of land-grant railroads to indemnity lands. My predecessor, Mr. Chandler, did not so construe it, but maintained the old regulations more favorable to the railroads. So I found them when I came into office in 1877. Being determined to concede to the corporation nothing but what, under a strict construction of the law, they were entitled to, I adopted the interpretation of Judge Davis's decision most unfavorable to the railroads, and changed the regulations governing the action of the Land Office, accordingly. After these new regulations had been in operation a considerable time, questions arose before the Department as to their correctness in point of law. As is customary and proper, and as every conscientious executive officer will do, I submitted the matter to the Attorney-General for legal advice. After hearing full argument the Attorney-General ruled in the clearest and most emphatic terms, that my interpretation of the Davis decision was wrong, and that, as to the point at issue, I had to return to the rule laid down and observed by my predecessors. This I did, not hastily and joyfully, as you falsely assert, but reluctantly; for the Attorney-General's opinion was given on June 5, 1880, and I changed the instructions to the Land Office accordingly on October 16, 1880, more than four months afterward. And this you call criminal eagerness on my part to serve the railroads.