WRITINGS OF SAl\-I HouSTON, 1843
192
the antipodes. Had he at once gone to the current value of the Exchequers, it would have been to the interest of the combination to have appreciated their value, whereas it has been to their interest to depreciate it. The law says they shall be taken at their current value in the market. If they are at a depreciation and three are absorbed for one, it will more rapidly reduce the circulating amount and that will certainly enhance their value. I am not aware of the character of the officers and employees generally in the Custom House. You have a knowledge of them and can determine upon their merits. They ought to sustain you in the discharge of your duties. If you deem a reorganization of the Department necessary, and any of the selections hereto- fore made be injudicious, I would say to you-correct the evil. In selecting officers to fill the various stations, do not permit your feelings of kindness or any other consideration to induce you to deviate from a good general rule. Permit no man to hold station under you in whose honor and honesty you have not implicit confidence. We are all liable to yield more or less to the importunities of men in our individual capacity; and this arises from a worthy and generous quality of the heart-sym- pathy or commiseration-but in selecting men for public office, these things ought to be repudiated, where men do not pos- sess qualifications of integrity as well as capacity. If you find men combining influence as well as other qualifications, it might be well to call them around you and let them sustain you in the discharge of your official trust. Officers are but the stewards of the people and the Constitution and the relations in which they stand to both enjoin upon them a sacred obliga- tion from the discharge of which they should never shrink. I have full confidence in you that you will discharge your duties and that you will have address sufficient to carry out the law. It is the work of the administration and though it be unacceptable to some, it is the creation of the representatives of the people, and those whose power has emanated from them; and they are in all conscience and duty bound to aid in its execution. If they shrink from it and prove recreant to them- selves, the calamity will fall upon them, but not upon the admin- istration. I sincerely hope that you will have no trouble in carrying out the provisions of the law. T'ruly your Friend, Sam Houston [Rubric] u•Houston's Pl'ivate Executive Reco1·d Book," pp. 364-365, courtesy o! Mr. Franklin Williams.
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