FIFTIETH CONGRESS, 1887-1889. 10938 
no power to make miscellaneous donations of $50,000, nor of 50 cents. 
We have the right, I think, to compensate for services where we 
believe those services have been rendered and have been valuable. I 
agree with Senators that Professor Baird in his lifetime and his family 
since his death could not be paid in dollars and cents for the services 
he rendered his country. 
While I believe that, I do not wish to excite popular indignation by 
giving an unreasonable amount in view of the fact that in the last nine 
years and three months of his service he was the recipient of $55,500. 
This $50,000 which we propose in our sympathy to give to this partic- 
ular lady, as worthy of it as any other lady no doubt, would make 
happy five hundred families of poor people if it could be given to them 
in hundred-dollar sums; and I have thought always, if this Govern- 
ment is to be converted simply into a charitable, eleemosynary institu- 
tion, that we ought to exercise good judgment and Christian charity 
in selecting the objects of our charity, and we ought to begin with the 
poor and unfortunate. 
Mr. President, I hope that my amendment will be adopted in lieu of 
the original proposition of the Committee on Appropriations. 
Mr. Stewart. I am constrained to say a word. I deprecate as 
much as the Senator from Texas any laws that have a tendency to take 
the money from the masses and give it to the few, and I have expressed 
myself pretty distinctly on that subject on various occasions during 
the present session; but I think that his speech was particularly ill- 
timed as applied to the present case. 
There is no man who has lived in this country who has done as much 
as Professor Baird for the poor, for the laboring men. I have traveled 
over a large portion of the United States, and at almost every railroad 
station now you will find a kind of fish that is not common to that sec- 
tion, that has been cultivated by reason of developing this industry by 
Professor Baird. Away up in Oregon, on Puget Sound, in San Fran- 
cisco, we have as fine shad as you have anywhere, and all over the 
country the poor people, who avail themselves of this food as much as 
any other, have had it brought home to their doors. ‘There has been 
more food placed within the reach of the poor by this man’s exertion 
‘than by those of any other man. He has distributed wealth and food 
among the masses, and, by the statement of the Senator from Kentucky 
and other Senators who are familiar with what he did, we are only 
giving to his family a reasonable compensation, a small compensation, 
for this great service he rendered, and there is no poor man who has 
had fish brought home to him who will complain of the compensation 
that is given to Professor Baird for this great good. 
So I do not think the speech of the Senator from Texas applies to 
this case. He may get sundry cases to which it does apply, but it 
does not apply here. This is the case of a man who has fed the poor 
