These charges on being signed by Hastings were presented to Congress
by Julian; and at his request they were referred to the Judiciary
Committee. That committee investigated them, considered the whole
affair a farce, and paid no further attention to it. But the next year
Mr. Holman, of Indiana, who succeeded Julian, the latter having failed
of a re-election, re-introduced Hastings' memorial at Julian's
request and had it referred to the Judiciary Committee, with express
instructions to report upon it. Hastings appeared for the second
time before that committee and presented a long array of denunciatory
statements, in which Judge Hoffman, myself, and others were charged
with all sorts of misdemeanors. The committee permitted him to go to
any length he pleased, untrammelled by any rules of evidence; and he
availed himself of the license to the fullest extent. There was hardly
an angry word that had been spoken by a disappointed or malicious
litigant against whom we had ever decided, that Hastings did not
rake up and reproduce; and there was hardly an epithet or a term of
villification which he did not in some manner or other manage to lug
into his wholesale charges. As a specimen of his incoherent and wild
ravings, he charged that "the affairs of the federal courts for the
District of California were managed principally in the interests of
foreign capitalists and their co-conspirators, and that the judges
thereof appeared to be under the control of said foreign capitalists,
and that the said courts and the process thereof were being used or
abused to deprive the government of the United States and the citizens
thereof of the property that legally and equitably belonged to them
respectively, and to transfer the same, in violation of law and
through a perversion of public justice, to said foreign capitalists
and their confederates and co-conspirators, and that nearly the
whole of the sovereign powers of the State were under the control
and management of said foreign capitalists and their confederates and
co-conspirators;" and he alleged that he "was aware of the existence
in the United States of a well-organized, oath-bound band of
confederated public officials who are in league with the subjects of
foreign powers, and who conspire against the peace, prosperity, and
best interests of the United States, and who prey upon and plunder the
government of the United States and the city and county governments
thereof, and also upon private citizens, and who now are carrying into
practice gigantic schemes of plunder through fraud, usurpation, and
other villainy, in order to enrich themselves, bankrupt the nation,
and destroy our government, and that their power is so great that they
can and do obstruct the administration of public justice, corrupt its
fountains, and paralyze to some extent the sovereign powers of the
government of the United States and the people thereof.
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