SIR: I respectfully apply to be appointed Surveyor-General for the District of Louisiana. Commendations from prominent gentlemen will be submitted to your Excellency to justify the appointment. I have the honor to remain Your very obedient servant, ORLANDO H. BREWSTER. U. S. GRANT, _President United States, Washington, D. C._ The reappointment was made on the 5th of January, 1877. The Chief of the Appointment Division in the Interior Department was asked and testified about it as follows: "_Q._ Who recommended his appointment in January? _A._ I think the probability is (although there is no evidence of it) that there was no recommendation, further than his own application to the President. _Q._ You do not know of any recommendation? _A._ I do not know of any. _Q._ There is none on file? _A._ There is none on file to the best of my knowledge. There is none on file in the Interior Department." Who does not perceive the shallow trick by which Brewster pretended to have divested himself of his Federal office that he might vote; only to be reinvested as soon as he had voted? The letter of resignation, with its false date, and its pretended acceptance, to take effect as of a time past, were evident shams to make it appear that he was not holder of a Federal office when he was elected; his affecting to be absent on the 6th of December, and coming in immediately to fill the vacancy occasioned by his own absence, in order to make it appear that his appointment was made on that 6th of December, instead of the 7th of November, and his barefaced application on the third day thereafter to be reappointed to the Federal office, from which he could not possibly have perfected his resignation before the 20th of November--all these were but so many contrivances to evade the highest enactment known to our civil polity. In the eye of reason and of law, he acted during the whole period under that influence of office which it was the design of the Constitution to prevent, and he must have entered more thoroughly into the work of his Federal master than if he had not gone through the form of resigning, inasmuch as that placed him, more than before, in his master's power. Let us now place side by side the commandment of the Constitution and the resolution of the Electoral Commission: