This done, he supposes that he is of course to be rewarded for the effort, the toil, and the expenditure of years, and that he will have an opportunity of indemnifying himself for his losses and sacrifices. He hears many beautiful apostrophes to the principles of equal justice and right which are said to characterize the legislation of his country, and control the action of the Government; but he is not prepared to hear that some adventurer has carried off his prize simply because by chance or by concert he has made his bid one thousand or ten thousand dollars lower than the prime projector. He becomes disheartened; finds that the country neither appreciates nor desires honorable effort and enterprise; that it will not reward the citizen in his self-sacrificing attempts to benefit the country and himself together; and that it will look on with careless indifference while his almost vested, his equitably vested rights, are neglected or stricken down. This is certainly one of the practical and demoralizing effects of the lowest bidder system, which respects no rights, however sacred, simply because based upon a dogma which is technically true. The system of the lowest bidder is technically correct, but practically wrong. It can not be carried out in practice without abandoning equity and honest rights under the plea of technicalities and the action of chances. It is in reality but a species of gambling, a miserable lottery, in which those who are most honest and truthful are invariably sacrificed. It is proper, then that Congress should not only establish the postal routes, but also determine either specifically or proximately the compensation to be paid; or leave this entirely to the discretion and the largest liberty of action of the Post Master General. Responsibility must attach somewhere if justice is obtained. With the lowest bidder system it rests and operates nowhere; and the most important operations of the Government are taken out of the hands of a wise public functionary and the intelligent legislators of the country, and put into a great wheel of fortune, where the proper person has, probably, but one chance in a hundred. This although true in every case of contract, is eminently so in cases of untried lines, where the experiment is to be made, and where it is generally necessary that an individual shall have spent years in bringing it to light.