lection of Mayor."
Butler looked at him a moment, and said: "I should think
they got up their Mayor on short notice."

His thrust at S. S. Cox in the House of Representatives attracted
the attention of the country. It was in a five-minute debate.
Cox had attacked Butler savagely. Butler replied, taking
up nearly the whole five minutes with arguing the question
before the House, taking no notice of Cox till just he was
about to finish. He then said: "There is no need for me
to answer the gentleman from New York. Every negro minstrel
just now is singing the answer, and the hand organs are playing
the tune, 'Shoo Fly, don't bodder me.'"

In the Constitutional Convention of Massachusetts twenty-
seven different schemes for a system of representation were
pressed. Somebody moved to refer them all to a committee
to consist of the persons who had proposed the schemes. "As
well refer twenty-seven babies to their twenty-seven mothers
to decide which is the prettiest," exclaimed Butler.

His military career was, with the exception I have stated,
disgraceful to himself and unfortunate to the country. From
the beginning of Butler's recruiting for the war, wherever
he was in command came rumors of jobs, frauds, trading with
the rebels through the lines, and the putting of unfit persons
in responsible positions. The scandal became so great that
Governor Andrew--than whom there was never a truer, nobler,
braver or more upright man in the executive chair of any State
in this country--was compelled to put on public record his
indignant denunciation. He said in a letter to Charles Sumner
and Henry Wilson, Senators in Congress, December 21, 1861:

"I am compelled to declare with great reluctance and regret,
that the course of proceeding under Major-General Butler in
this Commonwealth seems to have been designed and adapted
simply to afford means to persons of bad character to make
money unscrupulously, and to encourage men whose unfitness
had excluded them from any appointment by me to the volunteer
militia service, to hope for such appointment over Massachusetts
troops from other authority than that of the Executive himself."*

[Footnote]
* Schouler's "Massachusetts in the War," Vol. I., p. 276.
[End of Footnote]

The first considerable military operation of which he took
charge was a movement upon the rebel forces at Big Bethel.
It was rash, unskiful, blundering and lacking both in perseverance
and courage. His t