uniformly disappointed. The pleasure of receiving them was generally given to one of his clerks or attendants. He had the least possible taste for gallantries with any class; but he was far too wise and prudent to give to any woman a pretext for speculating upon her intimacy with him.

The volume of this kind of predatory correspondence was almost incredible. That he passed through this epoch of peculiar temptation without provoking a breath of scandal was a distinction which, unfortunately, can be claimed for few men in public life of equal eminence, in this or any other country.

CHAPTER VI

The cipher despatches - Tilden's address to the people of the United States in regard to them His examination by a congressional committee A calumnious report corrected - Repudiates a reported arrangement between the Senate and House committees to exempt his bank account from examination-Letter to Senator Kernan.

MR. TILDEN did not realize all the advantages to his health from his European trip that he had hoped for. His adventures in crossing the English channel undid much of the very considerable benefit which he seemed to have derived from it. While his general condition was improved, he could not disguise from himself the fact that his tremulousness was increasing, that his vocal organs were losing their flexibility, and that his left arm and hand were less useful to him than when he left his home. Though his health had now become a somewhat more serious preoccupation than formerly, he did not yet regard it as entitled to interfere materially with his future plans or customary occupations. His renomination for the presidency in 1880 was regarded as a matter of course by both parties, not only because he was immeasurably the most capable and popular candidate his party could present, but because he was the only candidate through whose election the nation could properly resent the wrong it had sustained at the hands of the Electoral Commission in 1877. He was now regarded by the administration, not only as a more formidable candidate than in 1876, but the consequences of his election now were regarded as more alarming than in 1876, especially to those who had participated in the frauds which put Hayes into the presidency. He was treated, therefore, from the very beginning of the Hayes administration as the one man in the nation who, at all hazards,

must be destroyed. This could not be accomplished by assailing his public life, his opinions, or his public teachings. That had already been tried pretty faithfully and had proved unsuccessful. A second attempt was certain to prove even less successful. There was one course left. The Potter investigation had satisfied the nation that Hayes had not been elected by the people, and that the majority of electors for him had been secured by fraud. To this there was no longer any defence, not even the benefit of a doubt. The only thing to do under those circumstances was, not to attempt to justify the installation of Hayes, but to persist in efforts to leave upon the public mind an impression which should stay there until after the next election at least, that Tilden and his party were just as bad as Hayes and his party, plus the risk of Tilden's being overruled by his party, and that the people had nothing to gain by a change of dynasty. As the administration had control of all the judicial, civil, and military forces of the government, and necessarily exerted a prodigious influence over all the organs of public opinion, this did not seem at the time a hopeless endeavor.

It is no exaggeration to say that the administration used all these forces with the energy and recklessness of despair.

I am aware that this is a grave allegation, - quite too grave to rest upon the unsupported dictum of any individual. I do not propose to leave it thus unsupported, but to produce such evidence as will, I think, bear conviction to any unprejudiced reader, that during the whole four years of Hayes' administration, and regardless of Mr. Tilden's age, his physical infirmities, his priceless public services, and the place which he occupied in the hearts of his countrymen, he was pursued by the agents of that administration with a cruelty, a vindictiveness, an insensibility to all the promptings of Christian charity, which men are rarely accustomed to exhibit except in their dealing with wild beasts.

Early in the month of October of 1878 a series of telegraphic despatches in cipher, purporting to have been addressed to well-known partisans of Mr. Tilden during the electoral crisis of November and December, 1876, appeared with translations in the "New York Tribune." These despatches conveyed the impression that persons holding more or less familiar, not to say confidential, relations with Mr. Tilden had been entertaining propositions for the purchase of the electoral vote of one or more of the contested States. The fact that the votes of many of the electors were notoriously in the market at prices which would scarcely have been a month's income to Mr. Tilden, and that he needed but a single one of them to secure the presidency, helped to give currency to this abominable suspicion, which received additional aliment from the appearance of the name of his sister's son, who with his wife and child was a guest with her in Tilden's house at the time, among the alleged negotiators.

To show the motive which animated the parties through whose agency these despatches-legally as well as morally, in the strictest sense of the word, confidential came to be public property, it is necessary to go back about two years and trace their history from the time their hallowed privacy was first violated, until they were spread out in the columns of an intensely partisan journal.

On the 23d and 24th of January, 1877, certain telegraphic despatches relating to the election in Louisiana were delivered to a committee of the House of Representatives, of which Mr. Morrison, a Democrat, was chairman, and certain other telegraphic despatches relating to the election in Oregon were delivered to a committee of the Senate, of which Mr. Morton, a Republican, was chairman.

Pursuant to the direction of Mr. Sargent, chairman of the sub-committee of the Morton committee, on the 25th day of January, about thirty thousand telegraphic despatches, purporting to be all the residue of the despatches relating

to the election in the possession of the Western Union Telegraph Company, were delivered to Mr. Burbank, a brotherin-law of Mr. Morton, and also the clerk of his committee, or to his temporary substitute.

Mr. Orton, the president of the Western Union Company, whom Mr. Tilden did not hesitate to characterize as an unscrupulous Republican partisan, had previously permitted his party friends to withdraw some of the despatches, and appears to have facilitated the surrender of the rest to the control of the chairman of the Republican senatorial committee, thereby practically excluding everybody else from the privilege of inspecting them. The particular despatches, sent to the Morrison committee, were returned. The other despatches were retained by the officers of the Morton committee until some time after the inauguration of Mr. Hayes, and were then, except such as in the meantime had been abstracted, returned to the telegraph company, and afterwards burned by its order.

Some of the despatches which had been abstracted were, more than a year afterwards, in the possession of one George Edward Bullock, of Indiana, who had been a messenger of the senatorial committee, and was a protégé of its chairman, Mr. Morton. This Mr. Bullock obtained from Mr. Hayes the appointment of consul at Cologne, upon the recommendation, among others, of Thomas J. Brady, of Indiana, the Second Assistant Postmaster-General, afterwards so notorious as the head of the fraudulent Star Route ring. Upon the eve of his departure, and after the appointment by the House of Representatives of a committee of investigation into the election frauds in Louisiana and Florida, of which Mr. Clarkson N. Potter was chairman, Mr. Bullock passed over to Mr. Brady-who, while Second Assistant Postmaster-General, had, with three special agents of the Post Office Department, attended the canvass in Florida, and must have been acquainted with everything done there such of the abstracted despatches