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SHAM RETRENCHMENT. – The Richmond Enquirer, with all its recent aberrations, sometimes hits the nail on the head. It does this particularly in a late article on the “sham retrenchments” commenced in the House of Representatives at Washington, in the abolition of foreign missions, and in the work of reducing the small salaries of the poor clerks of the executive departments, and in indignantly laying upon the table a paltry bill of five thousand dollars for extra clerk hire from the Post Office Department, when the great lobby job of the public printing, ranging from half a million to a million of spoils per annum, is left untouched. The jobs and schemes of the lobby constitute the real business of Congress in this matter of retrenchment. Let the House proceed to work in this mine of millions and tens of millions of spoliations and extravagances, and the country will believe they are in earnest. But this saving at the spiggot while pouring out at the lobby bunghole, will never replenish the treasury.
