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An old house that has gone many years without painting will absorb much more than a new one, but it is surprising what can be accomplished with two or three coats of paint on siding so weathered as to seem worthless. Besides, a new exterior robs an old house of some of its charm, so preserve the old if possible, architects, carpenters, and contractors to the contrary.
This plan was concocted with devilish ingenuity, for, if the war had actually broken out, the supplies of our army would have been of the worst possible kind, in order to give the best possible profit to the contractors; and Jost, with his newspaper influence, would have satisfied the public mind by printing constant reiterations of the completeness and excellence of the supplies, and the entire contentment and jubilation of the men!
These questions have received the careful consideration of your Commission, who are forced to the conclusion that the factory has not attained the object for which it was established, and that there is no reasonable prospect of it doing so. Further, that there are good grounds for believing that the contractors have failed to comply with the conditions of their contract.
I'm sure the rival contractors have set him up to this, because he was always decent to us before. "Another matter, too, makes me suspicious. We have tried to raise money in New York to tide us over while the government is holding up our funds here. But our New York office is meeting with difficulties.
When a big company like that contracts to build a hundred miles of grade, they at once begin to sublet portions to smaller contractors. Some take a mile; some two miles, some five according to the nature of the work and the respective capacities of their outfits. Understand?" "Yes I got that."
Jurgis had often wondered just who ate the canned corned beef and "roast beef" of the stockyards; now he began to understand that it was what you might call "graft meat," put up to be sold to public officials and contractors, and eaten by soldiers and sailors, prisoners and inmates of institutions, "shantymen" and gangs of railroad laborers.
It can be and it is done in some jails even now. Warden Fenton, of the Nebraska State Prison, has been putting his men on the honor system, and sending squads of them out to work on farms or for contractors, without guards or other precautions, sometimes for weeks at a time; all he asks of them is their promise to return when the job is done, which they uniformly do.
Nights as well as days were passed in the trenches that had been dug before the strong fortress of Sebastopol, which the allies were besieging, and the suffering of our English soldiers was far greater than it need have been, owing to the wickedness of many of the contractors who had undertaken to supply the army with boots and stores, and did not hesitate to get these so cheap and bad as to be quite useless, while the rest of the money set aside for the purpose was put into their pockets.
And as he spoke, the illustrious commissary came forward holding a vast bundle of papers in one hand, and his snuff-box in the other, followed by a long string of clerks, contractors, assistant-surgeons, paymasters, etc., all eagerly pressing forward to be heard. "It's quite impossible; I can't do it to-day. Victualling and physicking are very good things, but must be done in season.
And summer and winter alike, the Government contractors, or those employed by them, waxed fat on their contracts, which, if honestly carried out, would have kept us in reasonable content. How some among my fellow-prisoners managed to keep up their hearts, and to maintain even fairly cheerful faces, was a source of constant amazement to me.
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