to have lost faith in him. Three of the men sent to prison for their
complicity in the whiskey fraud were pardoned after six months.
McDonald, the chieftain of the gang, served but one year of his term.

The exposure of the Whiskey Ring was followed by an even more startling
humiliation. The House Committee on Expenditures in the War Department
recommended that General William W. Belknap, Secretary of War, be
impeached for "high crimes and misdemeanors while in office," and the
House unanimously adopted the recommendation. The evidence upon which
the committee based its drastic recommendation disclosed the most sordid
division of spoils between the Secretary and his wife and two rascals
who held in succession the valuable post of trader at Fort Sill in the
Indian Territory.

The committee's report was read about three o'clock in the afternoon
of March 2, 1876. In the forenoon of the same day Belknap had sent
his resignation to the President, who had accepted it immediately.
The President and Belknap were personal friends. But the certainty of
Belknap's perfidy was not removed by the attitude of the President, nor
by the vote of the Senate on the article of impeachment--37 guilty, 25
not guilty-for the evidence was too convincing. The public knew by this
time Grant's childlike failing in sticking to his friends; and 93 of the
25 Senators who voted not guilty had publicly declared they did so, not
because they believed him innocent, but because they believed they had
no jurisdiction over an official who had resigned.

There were many minor indications of the harvest which gross materialism
was reaping in the political field. State and city governments were
surrendered to political brigands. In 1871 the Governor of Nebraska was
removed for embezzlement. Kansas was startled by revelations of brazen
bribery in her senatorial elections (1872-1873). General Schenck,
representing the United States at the Court of St. James, humiliated his
country by dabbling in a fraudulent mining scheme.

In a speech before the Senate, then trying General Belknap, Senator
George F. Hoar, on May 6, 1876, summed up the greater abominations:

"My own public life has been a very brief and insignificant one,
extending little beyond the duration of a single term of senatorial
office. But in that brief period I have seen five judges of a high court
of the United States driven from office by threats of impeachment for
corruption or maladministra