WRITINGS OF 5AM HOUSTON, 1853
444
I will answer for it that he made a larger contribution than almost any other gentleman... ] I certainly intended to cast no reflection on Carolina, North or South, but I do not know that their general character for lit- erature might not justify me in representing them to have such a desire for books. [Laughter.] I certainly did not intend to impute the purloining to Carolina, because where the mails are sent in cars or steamboats they have not time or a good op- portunity to purloin. But I am furnished by the Senator from South Carolina, with an argument in favor of the resolution. He says the proposition is to print a book which not one Senator knows anything about. That is my reason for wanting the book. I want to know some- thing about it. I cannot see that there will be any danger in printing it, under the circumstances. The surveyor, who is to assist in making the report, is one of Virginia's brightest sons in his sphere of action. He is one of the most intelligent, able, enlightened, sagacious, industrious young men that I know anywhere in the United States. He was engaged on the Maine boundary, and on the boundary line between Texas and the United States; and I am sure, in point of capacity, he has no superior in a young man of his age. In point of observation, firmness, integrity, and everything that ought to commend him to consideration, no· man is more reliable, more truthful than Mr. Gray, and for these reasons, I wish to see his production. I do not, to be sure, agree with Mr. Bartlett in relation to the fixing of the initial point for the running of the boundary line between Texas and Mexico, but still I would like to know his general information; and if he was peregrinating throughout Mexico, when he ought to have been engaged in something else, we shall find out the reason of his absence, and the result ,_may be something very interesting and amusing. The report will inform us of various matters connected with Mexico, about which I would like to know something; but I am perfectly willing to submit to the decision of the Senate. I am not a great reader of books. In the reading of documents published by order of the Senate, I have confined myself pretty much to the Patent Office Report. [Laughter.] I have obtained a great deal of useful information from it-leaving out of view the mechanical branch of it, for I do not understand that. [Questions and remarks.] t' I
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