perhaps I should have been able to learn otherwise. I am ready to admit that when we come to attempt to make an estimate of what Professor Baird's services to the world, and to this country especially, have been we can not do so in dollars and cents.

When I offered the amendment a few minutes ago to reduce the appropriation from $50,000 to $25,000 I did it feeling that we should probably fail to do anything toward recognizing that great service, and for Mrs. Baird and the daughter, unless a smaller amount should be agreed upon than that which was proposed to be inserted in the bill by the Committee on Appropriations. Hence it was that I offered the amendment. I am ready to say now that so far as I am personally concerned I shall have no hesitation in voting for $50,000.

I believe that we have the power, in the first place, to do whatever in the judgment of the Congress of the United States is right to be done in the way of voting money to the widow and family of the late Professor Baird. I have no compunctions or doubts in my mind upon that question. But I am desirous that some appropriation shall be retained in the bill for the family of Professor Baird. It was with the feeling that there was doubt whether the provision as it was reported by the committee could be retained that I moved the amendment I did. I am willing now, if it is permitted by the Senate, to withdraw the amendment which I offered, and allow a vote to be taken upon the original amount before any amendment is offered, unless some other Senator shall see proper to offer one.

Mr. REAGAN. I wish the Senator would not withdraw the amendment, for I do not want to make the point of order, and I can not consent to an appropriation of $50,000.

Mr. CULLOM. The Senator from Texas indicated that he desired to make a point of order. I am not prepared to say whether the President of the Senate would sustain the point of order. It was on account of the suggestion made by the Senator from Texas, as well as the suggestion indicated by him that he would not make the point of order if a smaller amount was proposed, that I came to the conclusion that it was best, all things considered, to move, as I did, to amend the amendment reported by the committee. As it is probable that some other Senator will renew it if I should withdraw it, it may be as well that I should let it stand and let the Senate vote on it. I do not, therefore, withdraw my amendment.

Mr. H. L. DAWES. Mr. President, there is one view of the case which I feel ought not to be lost sight of by the Senate when they come to vote upon this question.

The connection of Professor Baird with this matter dates earlier than the statute of 1871. Before there was any such office or any duties imposed upon anyone with reference to this matter Professor Baird volunteered his services and came, as the Senator from Ken

tucky knows, to the Committee on Appropriations of the House and stated to them what his ideas were and what he thought was a possibility. He stated that if the Committee on Appropriations of the House would give him $5,000 he would devote his time without cost to the Government in experimenting to such an extent as to demonstrate the possibility of accomplishing something of value to the people of this country in the line of producing food-fish, and $5,000 two years before the date of the law, when there was no law regulating it, was appropriated for that purpose.

When Professor Baird had demonstrated freely to his own satisfaction and everybody else's what he could do, he drew the statute, and that it might not appear that he was seeking a place of gain or profit to himself, but that it was solely in the interest of the poor people of this country, he said: "I do not ask anything for this work; I am willing to devote all the time I have left from my duties at the Smithsonian Institution to the work." Then the law was adopted.

He created an institution; he created the law governing it; and under it from $5,000 a year we have imposed upon the officer created by that law the disbursement of more than $100,000 a year. From one single station for hatching fish close by him here at the Smithsonian Institution he has been required by appropriations from time to time and by the duties of an office voluntarily taken upon him to establish stations all over the country, first in the Lakes, then on the Pacific coast, down on the shores of Massachusetts and Maine, and down on the Southern waters. Everywhere where it was possible to make the experiment useful and demonstrate its possibility, the services of Professor Baird were required in the discharge of duties that he never could possibly have contemplated when he tendered his services.

Mr. HARRIS. Will the Senator from Massachusetts allow me? I believe the Senator from Massachusetts has been in one or the other of the Houses of Congress for the last eighteen or twenty years. If the Senator from Massachusetts regarded this service as meriting a higher degree of compensation than was being allowed and paid to that very distinguished and able official or person, whichever he may have been, why did not the Senator see that he was paid to the extent that his services merited?

Mr. DAWES. That is not an inquiry, it seems to me, becoming the Senator from Tennessee to make of me. I am showing what Professor Baird voluntarily took upon himself, and what we in addition, and beyond any possibility of a conception on his part, put upon him, and that without murmur or complaint or reference to the fact that the statute required it should be done for nothing, he willingly took the new burdens we imposed upon him until the end, seventeen years after it had grown up into an institution that no man could be

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 within our province and our duty to compensate for the services of this office, is raised this queer constitutional question. As has been so forcibly 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 in a 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 Department, 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 services 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 unfortunately, and I think it is unfortunate, the parsimony of Congress in

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' providing proper compensation for the valuable officers of this Government is almost a crime. There has not been a session, I think, since I have had the honor of a seat upon this floor when some case has not been presented where such injustice has been done the individual that provision was made for extra compensation for some officer of the Government.

There is no case that has ever been brought to my attention where the equities were so strong as in this case. As has been well said by other Senators, the services of Professor Baird excelled those of any other man in this generation. Not only did he perform the extra duties, as stated by the Senators from Massachusetts and New York, but I have the very best reason for believing that his own private property, the use of his own dwelling, was freely given to the Government in order that the great work he had in hand might go on.

In this very bill, and in every appropriation bill, I think, since I have been a member of the Senate, you have made provision for your officers who have performed not half the duty, to my best belief, and I say this with a full knowledge of the careful consideration which the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations gives to every item of this character. If there is any criticism on him and the members of the committee it is that they are too close, too parsimonious. In the very bill under consideration we have appropriated several thousand dollars for officers of our own body, men who have performed extraordinary duties and who are entitled to compensation. We required two or three of the most efficient clerks that we have in this body to give their time out of office hours to make an index and compile the records of the executive sessions from 1829 to the end of the Fortieth Congress, and it would have been cruel not to have compensated them for that work. Others who have compiled indexes and papers for the Senate have been paid for it. Their compensation has not been so great in the aggregate as the amount proposed to be given in this case, but it has been equally as great, and indeed greater, when you compare the service that was rendered.

Therefore, Mr. President, in the committee and here I take great pleasure in saying that in my best judgment this is a proper appropriation to be made, and I shall vote for it with great pleasure.

Mr. J. B. BECK. Mr. President, I agreed to this appropriation in the committee very cheerfully. I did so, perhaps, because I was as familiar with the great work performed by Professor Baird from the beginning as most men. When Congress first began to investigate the questions as to the cause of the decrease of food fishes in this country it was an experiment; a small appropriation was made, as the Senator from Massachusetts [Mr. Dawes] very well said, to see what could be done.

Professor Baird was an employee of the Smithsonian Institution,

drawing from it the only salary he received, it being a scientific institution, established by Mr. Smithson for the purpose of diffusing knowledge among men. We knew that Professor Baird was the best man to do the work, and he was willing to help us develop it and see what could be done in that direction, and he did it cheerfully.

Two years afterwards Congress passed a law largely extending his duties, labors, and responsibilities. The experiment was progressing satisfactorily; nobody could do the work but Professor Baird. Congress was anxiously looking to see the development, often without making the proper appropriations to carry it on. In fact, it grew up, as many things have done, as the Signal Service grew up, and as very many of the great institutions here have grown into great importance from small beginnings, from experiments to established facts, so the Fish Commission kept on progressing until it became one of the great institutions of the country.

While many leading men in both Houses were doubting whether it would be a success, Professor Baird was entirely confident that it would be, and he went on developing by his experiments that it would be, proving it by results year by year, until it became assured.

In the meantime I know, as the Senator from Massachusetts knows, for I visited his house time and again when we were working together in the House of Representatives, that Professor Baird was living in a plain house on New York avenue, plenty big enough for him and his family, for it was a small one and an unpretentious one, but he carried the clerks of the Fish Commission, our employees for whom we were bound to provide, to his own house, furnished them with workrooms for nothing, and when the work increased so that it could not be done there, using, as his statement and that of Senator Edmunds shows, in large part the money which belonged to his wife, inherited from her father, he built a house on Massachusetts avenue, and used the basement and other rooms of that building for our employees to do our work, not only charging no rent, but furnishing fuel, lights, and everything needed to carry it on. Afterwards, at an expense of thousands of dollars, which he had no sort of need to expend on his own account or for the comfort of his family, he added to his house for the purpose of better and more effectually carrying on the work of the Fish Commission. In short, he actually spent for the Government, if only moderate rent and actual costs, without interest, is allowed, more than half the amount now proposed to be restored to his family in this bill.

I need not tell Senators what Professor Baird did. They know it. The country knows it. I remember his coming to the Appropriations Committee room one day, after he had proved how most of the different varieties of fish could be hatched and where they could be most advantageously distributed, with a new discovery, of which he was very