I have seen the chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs in the House, now a distinguished member of this court, rise in his place and demand the expulsion of four of his associates for making sale of their official privilege of…

It has been one of those periods in which all experience teaches us to expect an unusual manifestation of public corruption, of public disorder, and of evils and errors of administration.

And yet I do not scruple to affirm that not only has there been less dishonesty and maladministration in the sixteen years of Republican rule proportionally to the numbers and wealth of the people than in the first sixteen years after the…

Let no man assert that I refer to the evils of those days as either excuse or palliation for the evils of ours.

That generation was a frugal and honest generation in the main, and they would have visited with the swiftest condemnation and punishment, every breach of public trust, whether through dishonesty or usurpation.

I made, in a speech at West Newton in 1876, an earnest attack on this system, and afterward in the Senate had a good deal to do with framing the Civil Service Law, as it was called, which put an end to it.

Perhaps the most dangerous attack upon the purity of the Government was the attempt of General Butler to get possession of the political power in Massachusetts, and ultimately that of the country.

What I was able to do to resist and baffle that attempt is the most considerable part of the public service of my life, if it has been of any public service.

Yet the lesson which these things have taught me is that the American statesman who believes that the doctrines of his party are sound should never abandon his principles or quit political life because of its corruption.

Let him never for any political advantage support or tolerate a corrupt man, or vote for a corrupt candidate.

If a man whose principles are good will yield to an evil motive, it is not likely that the man whose principles are bad will resist it.

They will vindicate and stand by any man in the contest for honesty and uprightness, be he Democrat or Republican, so long as they believe that the ends for which he is striving are for the public good.

They will not sustain a man whose counsel they think bad, however honest he may be in his own conduct, or however much he may desire to secure honesty in the conduct of others.

No man ever yet accomplished much good by abandoning his party while he continued to hold its principles.

Many men have accomplished a great deal of good by striving to purify it.

Every account of political history from the inside will exhibit abundant evidence of wickedness, wrongdoing, and petty personal motives, of low ambitions, of bargains and sales, of timidity, of treachery.

But, thank God, what is petty and personal is also temporary and perishable.

Saying, What is excellent, As God lives, is permanent.

But he and his associates in the Union Pacific Railroad seemed, in this matter, to be utterly destitute of any sense of public duty or comprehension of the great purposes of Congress.

They seemed to treat it as a purely private transaction, out of which they might get all the money they could, without any obligation to carry out the act according to its spirit, or even according to its letter, if they could only do so…

They seemed to have thought they were the sole owners of the Union Pacific Railroad and of the Credit Mobilier corporation, and that the transaction between the two concerned themselves only and not the public.

They treated it as if they were transferring money from one pocket to another.

The United States was not a mere creditor, loaning a sum of money upon a mortgage.

The railroad corporation was not a mere contractor, bound to furnish a specified structure and nothing more.

He has fallen at the very gate of an honorable and eminent career, and a thousand hopes are buried in his grave.