For instance, he had been trapped into making the unwary remark, "I do not want to repeal the Civil Service Law, and I never said so." I produced the following extract from one of his speeches: "I will vote not only to strike out this provision, but I will vote to repeal the whole law." To this he merely replied that there was "no inconsistency between those two statements." He asserted that "Rufus P.Putnam, fraudulently credited to Washington County, Ohio, never lived in Washington County, Ohio, or in my Congressional district, or in Ohio as far as I know." We produced a letter which, thanks to a beneficent Providence, he had himself written about Mr.Rufus P.Putnam, in which he said: "Mr.Rufus P.Putnam is a legal resident of my district and has relatives living there now." He explained, first, that he had not written the letter; second, that he had forgotten he had written the letter; and, third, that he was grossly deceived when he wrote it.

He said: "I have not been informed of one applicant who has found a place in the classified service from my district." We confronted him with the names of eight.

He looked them over and said, "Yes, the eight men are living in my district as now constituted," but added that his district had been gerrymandered so that he could no longer tell who did and who didn't live in it.

When I started further to question him, he accused me of a lack of humor in not appreciating that his statements were made "in a jesting way," and then announced that "a Congressman making a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives was perhaps in a little different position from a witness on the witness stand"-- a frank admission that he did not consider exactitude of statement necessary when he was speaking as a Congressman.

Finally he rose with great dignity and said that it was his "constitutional right" not to be questioned elsewhere as to what he said on the floor of the House of Representatives; and accordingly he left the delighted committee to pursue its investigations without further aid from him.
A more important opponent was the then Democratic leader of the Senate, Mr.Gorman.In a speech attacking the Commission Mr.Gorman described with moving pathos how a friend of his, "a bright young man from Baltimore," a Sunday-school scholar, well recommended by his pastor, wished to be a letter-carrier; and how he went before us to be examined.
The first question we asked him, said Mr.Gorman, was the shortest route from Baltimore to China, to which the "bright young man" responded that he didn't want to go to China, and had never studied up that route.
Thereupon, said Mr.Gorman, we asked him all about the steamship lines from the United States to Europe, then branched him off into geology, tried him in chemistry, and finally turned him down.
Apparently Mr.Gorman did not know that we kept full records of our examinations.