A SPECIMEN OF GOULD'S TUITION.
At the very dawn of his career in 1857, as a railroad owner, Gould had the opportunity of securing valuable and gratuitous instruction in the ways by which railroad projects and land grants were being bribed through Congress. He was then only twenty-one years old, ready to learn, but, of course, without experience in dealing with legislative bodies. But the older capitalists, veterans at bribing, who for years had been corrupting Congress and the Legislatures, supplied him with the necessary information. Not voluntarily did they do it; their greatest ally was concealment; but one crowd of them had too baldly bribed Congress to vote for an act giving an enormous land grant in Iowa, Minnesota and other states, to the Des Moines Navigation and Railroad Company. The facts unearthed must have been a lasting lesson to Gould as to how things were done in the exalted halls of Congress. The charges made an ugly stir throughout the United States, and the House of Representatives, in self defense, had to appoint a special committee to investigate itself.
This committee made a remarkable and unusual report. Ordinarily in charges of corruption, investigating committees were accustomed to reporting innocently that while it might have been true that corruption was used, yet they could find no evidence that members had received bribes; almost invariably such committees put the blame, and the full measure of their futile excoriations, on "the iniquitous lobbyists." But this particular committee, surprisingly enough, handed in no such flaccid, whitewashing report. It found conclusively that corrupt combinations of members of Congress did exist; and in recommended the expulsion of four members whom it declared guilty to receiving either money or land in exchange for their votes. One of these four expelled member, Orasmus B. Matteson, it appeared, was a leader of a corrupt combination; the committee branded him as having arranged with the railroad capitalists to use "a large sum of money [$100,000] and other valuable considerations corruptly." [Footnote: Reports of Committees, House of Representatives, Thirty-fourth Congress, Third Session, 1856/57. Report No. 243, Vol. iii. In subsequent chapters many further details are given of the corruption during this period.]
But it was essentially during the Civil War that Gould received his completest tuition in the great art of seizing property and privileges by bribing legislative bodies. While many sections of the capitalist class were, as we have seen, swindling manifold hundreds of millions of dollars from a hard-pressed country, and reaping fortunes by exploiting the lives of the very defenders of their interests, other sections, equally mouthy with patriotism, were sneaking through Congress and the Legislatures act after act, further legalizing stupendous thefts.