Harper's Weekly

“ If hostility to the Secretary can find nothing in his course to ridicule and censure but his active efforts to save the national property from an organized system of robbery, it is not a hostility that need make him uneasy. ”

“ Those who were called spies in the employ of the Interior Department were simply agents who were sent out to discover what depredations had been committed and who committed them, and if the department wanted to know any thing about the matter, these agents had to be called upon for information, as depredators are not in the habit of reporting themselves. ”

“ When these speculators have obtained from five to eight dollars per cord for wood, and from twenty to sixty dollars per thousand feet for manufactured lumber which they have taken from public lands, they can afford to pay the government at least a small part of their profit, as people in other parts of the country have to do. ”

“ Innumerable creeks, rivers, bayous, bays, and sounds make a greater quantity of timber accessible than at any other place on the Gulf of Mexico. The Custom-house records at Pensacola show that during the last fiscal year, ending June 30, 1877, 857 vessels, with 6826 sailors and a tonnage of 276,724 tons, cleared from that place, laden with 9,375,432 cubic feet of ships' spars and hewed timber, and 67,787,222 feet of sawed timber and lumber. The hewn goods are carried directly from the stumps to ships ”