Service with graft, gross
extravagance and inefficiency. I call on you to remove the Director and
four of his engineers, including Arthur Freet and James Manning, who are
present."

"Of what specific things do you accuse Mr. Manning?" asked the
Secretary, with a glance at Jim's impassive face.

"His Project is full of mistakes, some of them small, that,
nevertheless, aggregate big and show the trend of the Service. Up on the
Makon he made a road at a cost of a hundred thousand dollars that only
the Service used. He's put a thousand dollars into telephone booths
where two hundred would have been ample. Some of the canal concrete work
has had to be dynamited out and done over and over again. The farmer
pays for all this. Manning refuses to take any advice from the farmers
on the Project, men who were irrigating before he was born. His every
idea seems hostile to the farmer, whose land the farmer himself is
paying him to irrigate. Manning was trained by Freet, Mr. Secretary."

The Secretary tapped his desk softly for several moments, as if turning
over in his mind the opposing evidence brought out during the several
days of the Hearing. Jim had not been called on but Arthur Freet and two
other Project engineers had spent an entire day on the stand, quizzed
unmercifully by everyone in the room. They had disclaimed every
accusation. The Director of the Service, a quiet man of marvelous
executive ability, had made a bitter return attack on the Congressional
Committee, the farmers, the real estate men and the lawyers, accusing
them of being the conscious or unconscious tools of the Water Power
Trust, whose object was to destroy the Service.

An elderly Senator had risen and had addressed the Hearing. "I was one
of the fathers of the Reclamation Act. One of the fundamental ideas of
the Act was that it was not governmental charity but that every farmer
whose arid acres were watered would be willing to pay for it. I see but
one thing in all these protests against the Service and that is the
attempt to repudiate the debt incurred by the farmers to the Service.
And the attempt to repudiate is most bitter with the very men who
pleaded most loudly with the Government to irrigate their land and who
voluntarily pledged themselves to pay back during an easy period of
years the cost of the Projects. If it is a fact that this tainted idea
of Repudiation is creeping among the land owners on the Projects, I warn
you all that I shall use