I know nothing further about the contract, or any one connected with it.

I only know that if a man lives long enough he can trace a thing through the Circumlocution Office of Washington and find out, after much labor and trouble and delay, that which he could have found out on the first day if the business of the Circumlocution Office were as ingeniously systematized as it would be if it were a great private mercantile institution.
THE CASE OF GEORGE FISHER -- [Some years ago, about 1867, when this was first published, few people believed it, but considered it a mere extravaganza.

In these latter days it seems hard to realize that there was ever a time when the robbing of our government was a novelty.

The very man who showed me where to find the documents for this case was at that very time spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in Washington for a mail steamship concern, in the effort to procure a subsidy for the company--a fact which was a long time in coming to the surface, but leaked out at last and underwent Congressional investigation.] This is history.

It is not a wild extravaganza, like "John Wilson Mackenzie's Great Beef Contract," but is a plain statement of facts and circumstances with which the Congress of the United States has interested itself from time to time during the long period of half a century.
I will not call this matter of George Fisher's a great deathless and unrelenting swindle upon the government and people of the United States -- for it has never been so decided, and I hold that it is a grave and solemn wrong for a writer to cast slurs or call names when such is the case--but will simply present the evidence and let the reader deduce his own verdict.