whiskey were sold in St. Louis which had not paid the lawful tax, amounting to $700,000, through the collusion of officials attached to the Treasury Department, who were tried and convicted of sharing in the plunder. As St. Louis was but one, and by no means the most considerable, of the cities in which large distilleries were in operation, it was estimated and charged that from these frauds alone, which had been going on for many years, the loss to the treasury had been not less than $15,000,000 a year. O. C. Babcock, the President's private secretary, and one Avery, the chief clerk of the treasury, were both indicted for participating in these robberies. Avery was convicted, but to save the President's private secretary from the Stateprison, and for other reasons which it is too painful even to suggest, Mr. Henderson, the lawyer selected by the Attorney-General for the prosecution of these rogues, was displaced at the special instance of the President, as was publicly charged, and, so far as I know, never denied.

That the financial agency of our government abroad was taken from the old and responsible banking-house of the Barings, of London, who had held it through a long succession of administrations, and was given to the house of Clews & Co., of which one partner was an Englishman, but then residing in New York, and the other a Swede, who at one time was Swedish consul in New York, from which position he had been relieved at the instance of our government for blockade-running during the war. To secure their appointment it was charged that Clews & Co. agreed, in writing, to give a quarter, or some other portion, of their profits to one Cheever, a notorious familiar at the White House; another quarter to one James A. Van Buren, which name subsequently proved to be a pseudonym, and the appropriation to it was understood to represent a gratification to some personage too important to be named; and an eighth to a brother-in-law of the President. It is not surprising that, with so many divisions, the

dividends of Clews & Co. were disappointing, and that they soon failed and went into bankruptcy, debtors to the government for a large amount.1

That the soldiers of the United States were ordered to take possession of the legislative halls of Louisiana in 1874, and drive from the House those Representatives who were opposed to the usurpation of the executive chair by William Pitt Kellogg, the Jonathan Wild of Louisiana politics, who had been placed in it by the aid of a drunken and corrupt judge of a federal court.

That George William Curtis was compelled to retire from the Civil Service Commission, because "the circumstances under which several important appointments had been made seemed to him to show an abandonment both of the letter and the spirit of the civil service regulations," and because "he was unwilling to be held responsible for acts which he considered nothing more nor less than a disregard of public pledges and a mockery of the public faith."

That Mr. Bristow, the Secretary of the Treasury, and Mr. Cox, the Secretary of the Interior, who were the only friends of a reformed civil service in the cabinet, were expelled from it because they were its friends.

That one vice-president, one speaker of the House of Representatives, three senators, and five chairmen of congressional committees, all partisans of the executive, dishonored themselves, the government, and the nation by marketing their influence as legislators; that a secretary of the treasury did the like by forcing balances in the public accounts; that an attorney-general did the like by appropriating public funds to his own use; that a secretary of

1 The books of the State department show that the indebtedness to the government of Clews, Habicht, & Co., on the 24th of September, 1873, when they went into liquidation, amounted to $145,451.47. Up to November 29, 1887, the company had paid off $38,718.77 of this indebtedness. In 1882 the State department compromised with Henry Clews for his individual share of the indebtedness for $12,500, leaving the sum of $94,232.70 still standing charged to Clews, Habicht, & Co. on the books of the Register of the Treasury.

the navy did the like by enriching himself and his confederates out of percentages levied upon contractors with his department; while a secretary of war was impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors.

Then there was the Emma mine swindle, in which one of our ministers to England was understood to be implicated; enormous frauds in the Indian and printing departments and in the New York custom-house; extravagant and corrupt expenditures for post-offices and public structures of various kinds, which, during fifteen years, had amounted to $51,164,978, while for the same purposes during the seventy-two previous years of our national existence the corresponding expenditures had been less than twenty-nine millions. Then there was the Venezuela scandal, the San Domingo scheme, the Credit Mobilier scandal, and defalcations of public officers so numerous as almost to constitute the rule rather than the exception in the public service; so numerous, indeed, that the Secretary of the Treasury persistently refused to comply with the law which required him annually to report them to Congress.

I will not swell these pages with more of these unsavory charges, which, to be complete and explicit, would alone fill a volume. It will be for the historian, in due time, to deal with this saturnalia of crime and political prostitution, which few Americans even now can recall without a blush.

Most of these charges were established by congressional or by judicial inquiry, many by both. They of course placed many thousand individuals—indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say hundreds of thousands on the defensive, who, if deprived of the protection of a sympathetic administration, would be personally as well as politically ruined. They naturally dreaded the accession of a Democratic administration, from which they could expect little indulgence; but the prospect of having their operations reviewed by an administration with Tilden at its head made them desperate. His name had more terrors for them than

that of any other man in the Republic, and when his nomination with such practical unanimity by the St. Louis convention transpired, they realized at once that va victis was to be the battle cry of the campaign, and that Tilden must be beaten or they be ruined. They were in the condition of rats assailed in a room which offered no hole for escape. The situation gave them the courage and the recklessness of despair. They took up the cry of the furious goddess, maddened by the unsuccessfulness of her malice:

"Flectere si nequeo superos
Archeronta Movebo."

They did not undertake to defend themselves, for that, they knew, was useless. Their crimes were of record, and suspected, if not known, of all men. Their plan of battle was to assail Tilden with charges bred of their own foul imaginings; in the language of Voltaire, faire la guerre des pots de chambre, in the hope of persuading the people that he was no better than they, and that nothing was to be gained by admitting him and his party to power. They denounced him as a railroad wrecker, because he had employed his extraordinary talents as a lawyer and an organizer in rescuing a number of railways from bankruptcy and converting them into productive properties. They charged him with extorting excessive fees for his professional services, though he had never had a bill for services successfully questioned, nor had he ever accepted a contingent fee in his life. They charged him with rebel sympathies during the war, though he was one of the leaders of the revolt against the administration which was proposing to legalize slavery in the free Territories; though he supported Van Buren and Adams for President in 1848-9; though he refused his consent to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854; though he attended and his name figured in the list of officers of the Union meeting held in New York imme

diately after the attack on Fort Sumter, and also attended another meeting of the bar, held for the same purpose; and though he was during the war in more or less continuous consultation with every member of President Lincoln's cabinet, the only two surviving members of which were then on the stump advocating his election.

They charged him with intending, if elected, to indemnify the South for their losses during the rebellion and to assume the rebel debt-a charge for which there was only the flimsy foundation that the Southern States favored his nomination and were expected to vote for him at the election. Though the prospect of the payment of such losses had not been regarded of sufficient magnitude to deserve the notice of the nominating convention of either party, Mr. Tilden waived his right to disregard the charge, and in reply to a letter from the Hon. A. S. Hewitt, who then represented in Congress the district in which Mr. Tilden resided, gave these charges a most explicit and satisfactory denial. Even the "Tribune," which had already quite forgotten Mr. Tilden's oft-acknowledged claims to its respect as a man, and its admiration as a statesman, confessed that the charge which it had not thought unworthy of the hospitality of its columns had been fully disposed of by this letter.1

It was further charged that his health was too feeble to endure the fatigues of the presidential office, especially when increased as they would be enormously by the restoration of a party which had been excluded from the administration of the government for some fourteen years, and by such changes of men and measures as would be the inevitable consequences of such restoration.

It was not the Governor's health about which they were solicitous. They could have borne his clinical sufferings and even his demise with Christian fortitude, and aided perhaps in imposing the burden which would have contributed to it.

1 Tribune," Oct. 25, 1876.