time immemorial as a kind of court of chancery to consider claims against the Government which could not be recognized, which the Government does not regard as legal obligations, and Congress will not delegate to any tribunal the power to enforce them; but it has been in the habit, during all the time it has been constituted, to consider claims. of an equitable character. It seems to me that when a man voluntarily, without compensation, renders services of the great value that this man did, to say that he should not be compensated, that it did not raise an equitable obligation which Congress should consider, is to repudiate all considerations of equitable claims in Congress.

It seems to me that the services in this case were meritorious according to any idea I can conceive of, and that they were vastly. more valuable than $50,000. They were rendered through years of diligent service by an eminent man who was not in the habit of driving hard bargains, but who was devoted to his country, and who developed a great industry. The Government and the people have had the advantage of his services. It appears to me that the Government would be very unmindful of its duties and obligations to its citizens if it would not reward such services as these.

Mr. HENRY W. BLAIR. I should like to ask the Senator from Tennessee a question. I ask him where he finds the constitutional power for the Government to pay the expenses of burying a dead Senator who dies at home in vacation?

Mr. HARRIS. I do not know that I can find that at all; I find a thousand things done that I regret to see. The records bristle with unconstitutional usurpations of power. I regret that it is so.

Mr. BLAIR. Does the Senator think that an assumption of unconstitutional power?

Mr. HARRIS. I am not prepared to say that I do or that I do not, because I have not looked narrowly to that question; but does the Senator from New Hampshire hold this to be a debt to Professor Baird?

Mr. BLAIR. I do not know the circumstances of the case.

Mr. HARRIS. I suppose not.

Mr. BLAIR. I have been present only a few moments during the discussion, but from what I know of Professor Baird and his work I think we should give $25,000 if there is any want on the part of his family, and I would give it in the same way that I think it is essential that the Government of the United States shall be empowered to do a decent and fair thing, exactly as much so as an individual citizen.

Mr. G. F. HOAR. Mr. President, the case is exactly this: A citizen of a foreign country made a munificent donation to the people of the United States for the advancement of science, and a distinguished man whose life had been devoted to natural science was appointed to administer that fund, and was paid for it. He gave one man's full work, H. Doc. 732-68

in the prime of life, when he was at his best in body and intellect. He received from that fund a moderate salary, a salary probably not a tenth part of what he could have commanded by giving his scientific attainments to the service of manufacturing or railroad or other business interests. He was one of the great men of his day. Being paid for his services to science, not by salary, but by simply having rendered them, that account was made up. But in addition to one man's work he did voluntarily and without compensation in the service of this people the full work of two men more. He originated, organized, administered the great National Museum, and he rendered in that a service which as business men pay business agents would not have been half compensated by any salary like that which he was receiving as Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

In addition to that he originated and executed experiments and scientific work, the result of which by the common consent of all men conversant with the subject is to be that it will be much easier not only to supply the present generation of Americans with healthful, abundant, and cheap food, but he has shown us how to support and feed the hundreds of millions who are to come to this continent from all parts of the world and who are to be born here for generations upon generations to come. That was a gratuity. That was the greatest benefaction, with very few exceptions if with any exception, which God has given it to any human being in our day to render to his kind. I wish I could have the attention of the Senate for a moment. I think I have something to say which is worth while for my honorable friends. to hear, if they will do me the great favor to listen. I say that this man in devising and executing successfully these experiments has not only furnished our generation with cheap and abundant food, but has made it possible hereafter, in all probability, unless the judgment of scientific men is mistaken, to feed amply and cheaply the hundreds upon hundreds of millions who are to people this continent in no remote future.

In rendering that benefit to us and to future time this man sacrificed his life. After a full day's work in his other office he devoted without vacation, without rest, without pause, spring, summer, autumn, and winter, the year through, every hour, every minute, every second which he could snatch from his sleep. In rendering that service the strong, vigorous brain and body broke down. Professor Baird gave his life in rendering this service to mankind in the very prime and glory of his great intellect and his great physical frame just as certainly as any soldier ever gave his life on the field of battle.

Mr. President, I do not believe that the American people have such a constitution of government that there is nobody authorized so far to express the gratitude of the American people for that illustrious service as to make a decent provision for the widow that shall not come

from private charity. If the American Congress can not do this thing, the result is it can not be done on this continent. If the authority is not vested in these Chambers, it is not vested anywhere.

This was not a service to the State of Tennessee or to the State of Massachusetts; it was a service to the United States of America; and we have the same constitutional right to see that when this man gave his life for us in this way without asking terms, without demanding compensation, without thinking of pay, that at least there shall be some little pittance which shall save his wife and his daughter from the almshouse.

I want to know if on the narrowest construction of the terms it is not for the general welfare to have it understood and to have a policy adopted that when men do these things they shall be compensated. When these things are done in other governments, the man is raised to the peerage, vast tracts of land and vast funds are provided from the public treasury, and the family goes down for a thousand years, it goes down until it is extinct, honored and respected and raised above the rest of its fellow-citizens for the single service. Can we not do for the widow of Professor Baird a thousandth part as much as England has been doing for ten centuries for the race of some Norman robber who came over the sea with William the Conqueror?

It is for the general welfare that when men are sacrificing themselves in such services to this country they should at least know that the country has a power and a disposition which will not let their widows and their children go to the poorhouse.

We have done it a hundred times. A man in the Treasury a few years ago, after doing his duty as a clerk at a salary of $1,200 or $1,500 a year, devised some salary tables, which he worked on at night, and saved to the people who had to pay the vast number of salaries which are paid the labor of calculating in each one the fraction of a quarter, the fraction of a month, and the income tax, and all the deductions. We sent to the Court of Claims by the authority of this body last year that case, and the Senate passed for that little paltry year's service a bill within three or four weeks giving to that man $1,200 or $1,500, I do not remember exactly how much; the chairman of the Committee on Claims knows what compensation was given for that service.

Is it possible that we have a Constitution which has banished from this whole American continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from Canada to the Gulf, the power to be exercised anywhere of showing our gratitude to a national benefactor? Is the one supreme luxury which is given to the human soul, the luxury of gratitude, denied by our Constitution to this great American people? The Senator from Tennessee may believe it; I do not.

Would not the Senator from Tennessee vote for a monument to the memory of Professor Baird? Has he not voted for a hundred monu

ments to great soldiers and sailors of the war of the Revolution and of the later war?

Mr. HARRIS. He allowed the Senator from Massachusetts to vote for them.

Mr. HOAR. Who would like to see the monument to Professor Baird, with the inscription of this splendid and magnificent service, paid for by the Congress of the United States, and then have it written on its reverse: "N. B. His wife and children died in the poorhouse because the Senator from Tennessee did not think it constitutional to give them $25,000?"

Mr. W. M. EVARTS. Mr. President, I can not allow this item to pass without some notice from me. I certainly can not think that the Senator from Tennessee supposes that there is not lodged in the two Houses of Congress the power of disposing of money in the Treasury as the two Houses shall regard useful to the public interest.

No court, if there were courts with strict authority to keep us within our duties, could say that an effort by a nation to recognize and compensate services of a citizen was ultra vires for the nation that had power to apply money to the public welfare. If the public welfare can be consulted in advance for what it will gain for public welfare, it can examine for itself after the service has been performed, seeing whether it was not for the public welfare, and whether it is not for the public welfare that such services should be rewarded.

It is therefore a figure of speech to say that to a nation a debt is not a debt because it is one of gratitude, of duty, and of encouragement in the future as well as reward in the past, and that a debt of a nation is to be measured on a book-account debt and on proof in a piepoudre

court.

Mr. President, I want to look at the situation relieved from everything but the most distinct and direct examination of the attitude of the family of Professor Baird to this nation upon what none dispute about as the facts of the situation. Professor Baird, it seems, notwithstanding great occupations and valuable and brilliant services to science and the world, was so in love with this industry that if he did not invent it he raised it from the condition of an amusement to that of the feeding of a nation. He would not let it go because he would serve his family, his name, his patriotism, and the welfare of this country. He knew, we knew, we now know, that if these years of service had been relinquished by Professor Baird there was nobody who would carry on with the same volume and the same rapidity the development of this affair as he did. When he has died, in the strength of his manhood, entitled to calculate upon as long a life and as enduring a health as any man who ever undertook the trust and services of life, when it is over and ends at the zenith, it is discovered that besides these double services the compensation received has every dollar of it been

consumed in the support of himself and his wife and his daughter. In looking back at the record of the service, it is discovered that it had passed sub silentio, without the observation of this people or of Congress, that all this had been done by him without stipulating for payment or exacting compensation; and now it is said that when looking at the past we see that though these services might be done by the strong man in his life and his confidence in its endurance, in the actual situation of his death it has all been done at the expense of his wife and his daughter.

The nation looking at that can not say, "We might have accepted it from you, we might have endured it without being too careful of our own duties toward you;" but when we find at the end all that we are asked to do is to do afterwards what would have been just to have done at the time, how are we to discharge that obligation and upon what direct proposition or consideration on both sides? Read the simple clause of the amendment of the committee in the bill:

To enable the Secretary of the Treasury to pay Mrs. Mary H. C. Baird, widow of the late Spencer F. Baird, $50,000, in full compensation for the services and expenses of the said Spencer F. Baird during his administration of the office of Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries, from February 25, 1871, to the time of his death, in August, 1887.

Supposing I will not say a munificent but a just employer, finding that his salaries had been punctually paid in the lifetime of his employee, had found in the calculation of opportunities of future provision for those dependent on him that he had been cut off, and it had been the habit to give extraordinary value to this employer's administration in his affairs, could he not without seeming to defraud any rightful claims upon him say, "I will now reckon up what is proper to be paid, not as a gift, not as a gratuity, not as a bounty, but in my own calculation of what I will have measured as a just satisfaction of these long enumerated and uncompensated services?"

It is thus, then, Mr. President, that we are absolutely free from any pretension that we have not the power under the Constitution of estimating services to the public welfare and fixing their compensation.

I must think, then, there is nothing left for us but to say, "As this was not done in advance and has passed long without recognition as needing compensation, it should be done now." It is too late, they say, for us, because there is no such relation of stipulation and obligation as to permit us to measure and compensate as we now see to be just. Mr. CULLOM. Mr. President, I do not believe there is any Senator on this floor who appreciates more highly the very distinguished work of Professor Baird than I do. It so happened, by the favor of the Presiding Officer of the Senate, that I was thrown with him in connection with the administration of the affairs of the Smithsonian Institute, and thereby came to know more of his life and services than