William Alexander Linn, Horace Greeley Founder and Editor of The New York Tribune

[99] that the national legislators were as much in duty bound to attend strictly to their public business, and so to earn their pay, as was a man in private employment. Two days after he took his seat he scored the absentees. In a letter to the Tribune, speaking of the “annual hypocrisy of electing a chaplain,” he said: “If either House had a chaplain who dared preach to its members what they ought to hear — of their faithlessness, their neglected duty, their iniquitous waste of time by taking from the treasury money which they have not even attempted to earn-then there would be some sense in the chaplain business.” This he followed on December 22 with an exposure of the mileage abuse which involved him in a bitter contest with his fellow-members, and gained him wide notoriety.

Members of Congress then received pay at the rate of eight dollars a day, and mileage at the rate of forty cents a mile, by “the usual traveled route.” When Greeley made his first call on the sergeant-at-arms for his money, he was shown a schedule giving the amount of mileage drawn by each member. Some of the figures appeared to him to be extravagant, and he at once decided on a step, conscientiously taken, but