Mr. CONNESS. To that point desire to call. thaattentipu of the Senate. The existiu revenue laws provide for giving one half, believe, of the amount of the value of seized, goods to the customs officers to the collector, to the naval officer, and to the surveyor of the prosecute more successfully hat was the ObjGCt, and that t. My experinee is (and I have had a little light upon w tI am oing to say) that the customs officers of the U.S. have but in rare instances. ever instituted prosecutions against persons, when they con(1 seize the goods, and then the persons would fail to claim them, would abandon them, and thus allow a division of the goods that would be profitable to the otheers. I can state in reference to the port of SanFrancise o alone, that in proportion to the amount of business done, which is very great, as many attempts have been made at smuggling or fraudulent importation as, perhaps, at.any other port in the Union; and the cases are few and far between ( perhaps there never have been half a dozen al told) where prosecutions have been instituted and carried out against the persons engaged in perpetrating the crime. On the contrary, my opinion is and I have filed at the Treasury Dept before this time, official evidence going to show upon the sworn allidavits of subaltern officers of the customs at that port, that a ain and again information was presented to the collectors, naval officers, and surveyors that fraudulent importations were being made, that the laws were bein violated, and the criminals ointed out, but those officers in place of causmg ar rests to be made and stopping the crime there refused to do anything of the kind, but hide their time until such a period as they could seize the largest amount of goods, and then upon an abandonment of the goods by the parties who perpetrated the crime where there could be a division of the goo with them, they abandoned the prose cution and the prosecution was never ressed. Now, I under ta e to say I cannot speak with certainty, for I am not sufficientl acquainted with the law that it will be ound upon an investigation that the existing laws, without this portion of the not before us, are sufficient already for the punishment of persons on aged in infracting and violating the law; said that the better remedy to compel that to be done would be to take away this immense incentive that exists under the present law in the profits which are given to customs officers by the seizure and conservation of goods. I have heretofore suggested to the Treasury Dept that the law be changed in that respect, and one of the Secretaries, I believe, was in favor of it; indeed, he told me on one occasion that he would recommend such a change as would give a reasonable %age to the otheer, and make it not so much his duty to compromise with crime and get the goods as it was under the existing law. If really the difficulty is in what I point out, if the reasonwh ersous have not been prosecuted and commute is that this great incentive exists, the incentive should be removed and the law allowed to remain as it is in this respect and otheers compelled to do their duty under the law. I apprehend that the Treasury Dept are entirel in the fog, entirely in error in this respect. hey have arrived at their conclusions by the Commissioner of Customs, and other officer s in that Dept. They saw that there were a great many seizures and but few criminal prosecutions; and the disparity between the fraudulent importations and the consequent. seizures and the number of prosecutious, led them to the erroneous couclusion that some additional statutory enactments were necessary to prevent that condition of things. I have no doubt. from the knowledge I have of these affairs that has come to me now for a series of years, that what I state is really the condition of the case, that the law is sufficient already for the punishment of the crime; but that as long as the reward is so great for compromising crime you cannot punish any person. Now, the question is whether you shall make your laws unnecessaril vindictive and throw the burden of proof, in the trial of a person, upon him, when under the law, as it exists, no sulficient effort has ever been made to convict.