The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1869-01-30
f, The Worms in the War Department.

Eroul 1he ~ T. World.
A clever English journalist some time ago
drew a most formidable picture OF the ON
nivorous appetite and the indiscriminate de-
structiveness of the common domestic cat, as
Illustrated by the devastations which, even iu
the best regulated households, are hsbitually
and successfully charged to tue account of
Grimalkin. The cat consumes with an equal
avidity whole jars of raspberry jam and whole
bottles of olives, drinks Burgundy aud beer,
tears up choice literature for his mirth, and
make gifts of costly lace and glittering
diamonds to the tender object OF his most mu-
steal, most melancholy passion.
What the cat ia, both in and out of the cup
board, the worms, we are confident, will one
day be found to have been in the War Depart
ment. When that unhappy one yet unborn,
the culture historian of the civil war;" by the
permission of his Msjesty's War Minister, or
of the Committee for War Of their Mghti-
Desses the Supreme Congress, or of whatever
funotionary may in that far.of time to be,
control the military archives of the nation,
shall enter in to examine the legends OF the
age of Grant and Lincoln by the help of
documenty evidence, he will surely find that
the worms of Washington have made almost
as much havoc with reports, instructions,
general orders, and the rest, as the pisoatorial
monks of Mount Athos with those ancient
and priceless manuscripts of their multitudi-
nous converts which they discovered to be an
excellent kind of bait for turbot. But with a
difference. The monks, with all their misogy-
nism and their orthodoxy, were no bigot5 in
the way of bait. They cut up
Arian vellum and Athanasian parch-
ment with equal shears, seeking only
the eventual turbot, and thinking nothing
of what they might be saving in the way of
arguments for heresy or losing from the
armory Of the true faith. The War Depart
ment worms, on the contrary, will be found,
we venture to say, TO have been "trooly-loil'
worms. Their intelligence will amaze the
naturalists as much as their activity will
aggravate the historians of the future. 1t
will appear that their appetite for official re-
cords was guided and controlled by strict
devotion to the renown of the radical leaders
and the fame of the "almost divine Stanton"
In fact, this is already, in our own time, be-
ginning to be suspected of these remar kable
'creeping things" The World long ago
pointed out the extreme probability that
nothing but "new broom vigorously
used in the department could guaran-
tee the preservation intact of the
national military records. When Pre-
sident Johnson endssvored to supply
some such guarantee e, he was instantly assailed
by the whole radical faction and forced to fore
60 his purpose. And now comes General
Banks and pretty clearly intimates that the
mischief has been DONE In an article under
stood to have been ''insplred" if not written
by General Banks, which appeared the other
day in the Boston Trarelier, it is limited, with
quite Hibernian directness that "Mr. Stan
ton took advantage of his position as Secretary
of War to destroy important public docu-
ments, and especially those which might pre-
vent his own political preferment." "Mr.
Stantonf' Not at all II is the worms that
have done tue work; the worms of which
Senator Sumner forgot the gluten aud the
greed when he was at the superfluous pains
of adjuring them to ''stick," as much as Pre-
sident Johnson forgot the instincts and the
tastes when he vainly hoped that self-respect
and decency would act upon them as ver-
mifupe,