, the Government had
done the same sort of thing. This money did not belong to the
Government, but to the people from whom they had taken it. From private
sources in Washington I learned that officials were overwhelmed with
demands for pensions from first-class loafers who had never been of any
service to their country before or since the war. They were too lazy or
cranky to work for themselves. Grover Cleveland vetoed them by the
hundred. We needed the veto power in America as much as the Roman
Government had required it in their tribunes. Poland had recognised it.
The Kings of Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands had used it. With the
exception of two states in the Union, all the American Governors had the
privilege. Because a railroad company buys up a majority of the
legislature there is no reason why a Governor should sign the charter.
There was no reason why the President should make appointments upon
indiscriminate claims because the ante-room of the White House was
filled with applicants, as they were in Cleveland's first
administration. My sympathies were with the grand army men against these
pretenders.

What a waste of money it seemed to me there was in keeping up useless
American embassies abroad. They had been established when it took six
weeks to go to Liverpool and six months to China, so that it was
necessary to have representation at the foreign courts. As far back as
1866 it was only half an hour from Washington to London, to Berlin, to
Madrid. I have seen no crisis in any of these foreign cities which made
our ambassadors a necessity there. International business could be
managed by the State Department. The foreign embassy was merely a good
excuse to get rid of some competent rival for the Presidency. The cable
was enough Minister Plenipotentiary for the United States, and always
should be. I regarded it as humiliating to the constitution of the
United States that we should be complimenting foreign despotism in this
way.

The war rage of Europe was destined to make a market for our bread stuff
in 1886, but at the cost of further suffering and disaster. I have no
sentimentality about the conflicts of life, because the Bible is a
history of battles and hand to hand struggles, but war is no longer
needed in the world. War is a system of political greed where men are
hired at starvation wages to kill each other. Could there be anything
more savage? It is the inoffensive who are killed, while the princip