I know one who has to paste all sorts of
little scraps from the newspapers into a scrapbook--sometimes as many as
eight or ten scraps a day. He doesn't do it well, but he does it as well
as he can. It is very fatiguing. It is exhausting to the intellect.
Yet he only gets eighteen hundred dollars a year. With a brain like his,
that young man could amass thousands and thousands of dollars in some
other pursuit, if he chose to do it. But no--his heart is with his
country, and he will serve her as long as she has got a scrapbook left.
And I know clerks that don't know how to write very well, but such
knowledge as they possess they nobly lay at the feet of their country,
and toil on and suffer for twenty-five hundred dollars a year. What they
write has to be written over again by other clerks sometimes; but when a
man has done his best for his country, should his country complain? Then
there are clerks that have no clerkships, and are waiting, and waiting,
and waiting for a vacancy--waiting patiently for a chance to help their
country out--and while they, are waiting, they only get barely two
thousand dollars a year for it. It is sad it is very, very sad.
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