1080 CONGRESSIONAL PROCEEDINGS. 
procured to discharge the duties of for any such sum as we found it 
necessary after he died to affix to an office created to do just what he 
had been doing voluntarily, without requirement from anybody, for 
nothing. When he died the President found it impossible to procure 
any man under the description here from among the civil officers of 
the Government to discharge these duties. He tried the experiment 
of a distinguished officer of the Treasury Department, and he declined. 
He tried others, and they would not undertake the work. -It was 
found necessary to seek an employee of the Smithsonian Institution to 
discharge these duties until an act could be passed by Congress creating 
an office with a salary of $5,000 a year to do that which Professor 
Baird had done for nothing. 
Now, because of the suggestion that it is quite vad our province 
and our duty to compensate for the services of this office, is raised this 
queer constitutional question. As has been so Suncililys said by my 
colleague and the Senator from New York, we have been doing it 
daily. It occurs to me that we at one time took out of the Treasury a 
large sum and paid it to Professor Morton for the value, not only to the 
United States, but to mankind, of a discovery which he had made. 
Every day ina smaller way it is done. I believe in the legislative, 
executive, and judicial appropriation bill just passed there was a small — 
appropriation which involved all this. A clerk in the Interior Depart-. 
ment, a valuable clerk there, was sent by the Interior Department 
upon responsible duties in the far West, and there was no law by 
which he could draw anything but his meager salary in the Interior 
Department. 
Without a word from anybody there was put into the legislative 
appropriation bill what the committee thought was a proper and a fair 
additional compensation to him for the increased duties and burdens 
imposed upon him. He had to disburse about $15,000. Professor 
Baird had to disburse and become personally responsible for $100,000 
year after year for many years. Yet we can not find it in our power 
or in our disposition, one or the other, to recognize the value of sery- 
ices imposed upon a willing and enthusiastic servant of the people by - 
the Congress of the United States, and we are unwilling to make fair 
and decent compensation to his representatives. 
Mr. Spooner. I offer two amendments to the pending bill and move 
that they be referred to the Committee on Public Buildings and 
Grounds. 
The motion was agreed to. 
Mr. A. P. Gorman. Mr. President, I should very much prefer that 
no case of this kind should come up for consideration, and except for 
the extraordinary circumstances surrounding it I would not be -in 
favor of making an appropriation of this character. But unfortu- 
nately, and I think it is unfortunate, the parsimony of Congress in- 
