In one of his communications to the public he said:1 "I declined retainers from Fisk in matters involving no scandal, but in which he had not my sympathy after he had informed me that he had paid counsel, during the year, many times the largest fee I had ever received, adding, We don't want anybody else we want you.''

In repelling an assault made upon him some years later by a corrupt judge in New York city whom Tilden had been instrumental in impeaching, he made some statements which set forth in impressive terms the ethical principles which controlled his professional life. He was charged with receiving a retaining fee of $10,000 from the Erie Railroad for which he did no work, and for which he was expected to do nothing, unless it was to compromise himself in the interest of the rogues who then had possession of that corporation. The late George W. Cass effectually disposed of the imputation in his reply to a letter addressed to him by Mr. Tilden, near the close of which Mr. Tilden said:

"I do not mean to say that it might not happen that a retainer is sometimes received and yet no further services rendered in the case. I presume that this often happens without impropriety. I have only to say that, so far as I recollect, it never has happened to me in any single instance of my professional life. I have been content to receive compensation fixed by agreement with my clients after the services were rendered. I have in no instance had any controversy or difference of opinion with any client as to the amount of compensation. I have never heard of any discontent after the settlement, unless this may be such a case. "Since there is an elaborate attempt to misrepresent an

Jan. 9. To drawing special forms of bill of sale and power of

11.

attorney to transfer the stock of the Wyoming Coal
Association, and also power of attorney to execute
the articles of said association

To attending consultation and advising in respect to
certain contracts with boatmen

1 New York City Ring, its Origin,” etc., p. 15.

$15.00

10.00

act of my professional life, I have a right to say this, without the imputation of egotism; and I have a right to add that, for the last sixteen years, at least, my only trouble has been not to accept more business than I could perform according to my standard of duty and justice to those who intrust their affairs to my management; that I have not accepted half which has been offered, of cases in which the clients were willing themselves to fix my compensation to my full satisfaction out of what they would recognize as acknowledged benefits.

"And I have never hesitated to choose what business I would decline. At the outset of the famous litigation of the Erie, under the presidency of Mr. Eldridge, it was communicated to me that the Erie desired to retain me; and afterward Mr. J. C. Bancroft Davis, in its behalf, twice came to my office to offer me retainers. I declined. In 1869 Mr. James McHenry, when acting in apparent unison with the Erie, several times pressed upon me retainers, in behalf of his scheme of reorganization of the A. and G. W.; but after considering his scheme, I declined. In the same year Mr. James Fisk, Jr., called upon me with Mr. Jay Gould. Mr. Fisk said, with many flattering suggestions, that they desired to retain me in reference to a matter then pending, and in the course of the interview he stated that they had paid within a year $125,000 to a member of the bar whose name he mentioned. I declined. I do not mean to imply that there would have been anything wrong in acting as counsel for Erie in a proper case; but simply, when an act of mine is challenged, to state facts which are pertinent to my vindication. I have ever stood, not only in my personal conduct, but in my public influence, for the dignity and honor of the bar and the purity of the bench, and against whatever should tend to weaken or degrade the administration of justice. I did so in 1869, when the evils of corrupt times. were growing and powerful. I accepted issue in the Democratic State convention of that year. On the 1st of February, 1870, at the meeting which resulted in the formation. of the Bar Association, I uttered these unpremeditated thoughts:

"If the bar is to become merely a method of making money, making it in the most convenient way possible, but making it at all hazards, then the bar is degraded. If

the bar is to be merely an institution that seeks to win causes, and to win them by back-door access to the judiciary, then it is not only degraded, but it is corrupt.

Sir, I believe that this country is to-night at about the lowest point in the great cycle which we have occasionally to traverse. I believe that there will come a sounder and a better public sentiment, in which speculation, and gambling, and jobbing, and corruption will lose their power, and in which free government will vindicate its right to the confidence of mankind. If I did not believe this, I should think that a very great part of my own life was lost, and all the traditions I have derived from my ancestors.'

"It is not to be wondered at," says James C. Carter in a recent admirable sketch of Mr. Tilden,1 "that with his profound knowledge of the causes by which human affairs were controlled, combined with such capacities for skilful action, he should have accumulated a large fortune. Aside from what he received for professional services, his large gains were, I imagine, rather easily acquired. Among the mischiefs of an unstable currency is the facility with which men who have the power of dealing skilfully with exceptional conditions may amass large fortunes. Few men understood such things better than Mr. Tilden. He had striven to prevent, as well as a man in opposition could, the issue during the war of an irredeemable government currency; but I remember his saying to me after the policy was adopted, in substance, 'Now is the time to make yourself rich. Buy all that you can pay for or run in debt for. Every day it will be easier for you to pay, and your property will correspondingly rise in value or rather in price.' And at the close of the war he advised the opposite course. I do not know, but I have no doubt he acted extensively on this policy. If there were a question about the propriety of such action he certainly was excusable. Had his counsels been regarded, no such measure would have been adopted."

"Atlantic Monthly Magazine," October, 1892.

Tilden never allowed himself to accept a contingent retainer. He judged very properly that such a partnership had a tendency to distrust the proper relations of a lawyer with his clients, and exposed him both to temptations and suspicions which were apt to prove inconvenient and sometimes degrading.

His propensity to thoroughness in all his mental operations made him sometimes tedious before popular assemblies, but in time it came to be pretty generally understood that he never took the platform without having something to say which no one else was likely to say, and without which the presentation of the subject would have been incomplete.

He never lost his presence of mind in court, on the platform, or indeed in any assembly, nor did he ever seem surprised or embarrassed.

He has been heard to say that he had great temptation, because considerable faculty, for sarcasm, but that he made up his mind early in life that one may make as incurable wounds with the tongue as with a dagger, and that a triumph achieved by means of a mortifying or humiliating sarcasm is dearly bought at the cost of incurring an enmity for life. He frequently deplored in John Van Buren his inability to suppress a smart thing, whoever it hit and however it might prejudice the cause he might be advocating. Tilden never lost a friend nor made an enemy by this sort of indiscretion. If he chaffed, as he occasionally did, a presuming opponent, he did it in a way that instead of making his victim angry made him grateful rather for his forbearance, and indisposed him to ever again attempt any liberties with an adversary at once so formidable and so considerate.

He won his cases, so far as success depended upon himself, by no stage tricks or artifices, still less by any technical subterfuges, but by sheer intellectual force concentrated upon the point of least resistance, which point he was pretty sure to discover before engaging with his adversary.

His business habits were about as bad as they could be: one could never count upon finding him at his office; he was not punctual; he would stop and talk for hours with a person casually encountered on the street when he knew clients were waiting for him at his office by appointment. He seemed to have appropriated to himself the prerogative in regard to time which the common law only confers upon kings, and to be under the impression that in the long run the world could lose nothing by waiting for him. This was due primarily to his health, which had prevented his submitting to the rules or enduring the discipline of any well-conducted business. Incident to and consequent upon this neglected training was an utter want of method. Those who knew him well would not be in the least surprised to be told that when in full practice he never endorsed or filed away any law paper or made an entry in his register. But if a paper in any proceeding was wanted, and when called for was not promptly produced, he made the office so uncomfortable for his clerks that they took good care to supply the order and method which he lacked, and for which he was unwilling to expend any thought or trouble.

Had not Mr. Tilden's life, like Pope's, been a "long disease," and had his intellectual forces been sustained by an unimpaired physique, his success at the bar would probably have been of such an exceptional character, that, if it did not gradually extinguish his taste for politics, it would have made him a controlling force in our government at a much earlier period of his life, and, in all human probability, the hero of many and more important chapters of his country's history than it is now my privilege to record.