Chief Justice of the State, a man who began his political career by writing editorials in favor secession and drinking toasts to the health of Jefferson Davis. Persuaded to become a Republican by the promise of preferment, he has been continuously in office with an accidental hiatus of one year from 1860 to 1880. During this long period he has habitually trafficked in justice, defrauded his clients, basely plundered his partner, and insulted society by his degraded and flagrant immorality. He has never made a promise he did not break nor had a friend whom he was not willing to betray.

In this political judge these frenzied conspirators found a willing accomplice.

Feebly protesting that he was not a candidate, though every one knew that for five years he had trodden every devious path that led toward the Capitol, that he took his seat on the bench merely as a steppingstone to the Senate, he descended into the mire of personal politics, accepting the nomination in a calumnious speech, and then attempted to secure success by the open purchase of votes. Much has been said about the purity of the ermine. That traditional fur was never dragged through a fouler puddle. The very seat on the bench that was to be vacated was promised to two anxious aspirants, and the entire political wardrobe of the state was divided in anticipation

of my defeat, like the apparel of Joseph among his brethren. My election was the triumph of decency over disorder. It was a victory of the people over the machine politicians. It was achieved against tremendous odds and in the face of obstacles almost insurmountable. It ought to have ended there, but the discomfiture of the opposition was too complete, and their baffled rage found vent in an investigation before a Committee of the Legislature, which was packed by a perjured Speaker, for the purpose of convicting me.

This so-called investigation was a flagrant burlesque of justice, a prodigy of partizan unfairness. The hostile tribunal, organized to find me guilty, sat for weeks with closed doors, without attorneys or spectators, no witness knowing what had been testified, without notice to those whose rights and reputations were thus brutally assailed, and finally exonerated me in a majority report which was adopted by the Legislature. The Chairman of the Committee, a weak but not wicked man, who has been rewarded for his violation of his promise to vote for me by the office of Reporter of the Supreme Court, revolted at the injustice that he had been selected to do.

Thus, having been endorsed by the people, elected by the Legislature, and vindicated by the Committee, I had reasonable ground to anticipate immunity from annoyance.

Had the United States Senate been Republican, no further effort against me would have been made. But the Senate was Democratic, and as I was a John Brown, bloody shirt, stalwart, antiadministration Republican, these shallow Memorialists reasoned that the Democrats would eagerly snatch at any opportunity to destroy me. Extracts from my speeches at Osawatomie and elsewhere were reprinted and sent to Democratic Senators, and Eggers and Stumbaugh, like a couple of Scarabaei trundled their feculent orb of ordure, with its egg of malice, along the dusty highways to Washington.

I have on occasion hitherto criticised the Democracy with candor. I shall do so without reserve hereafter. But I shall never forget that they dealt fairly with me; and that they refused to become allies of my enemies; that they were incapable of personal injustice for the sake of real or fancied political advantage.

When the evidence taken by the Legislative Committee, with the Memorial asking for further investigation, was laid before the Senate and referred to the Committee on Privileges and Elections they refused to entertain it, holding that the decision of the Legislature was satisfactory, in the absence of additional allegations.

Whereupon was filed a supplemental Memorial alleging that ten members of the Legislature,

naming them, had been induced to vote for me by corrupt payments of money or promises of office. The investigation was then ordered, and a sub-Committee of five assembled at Topeka in September and sat three weeks, taking several hundred pages of printed testimony.

When the sub-Committee convened, the Memorialists promptly withdrew the charges against seven of the gentlemen named in the second Memorial, and offered nothing but vulgar gossip and rumor about the other three. This supplemental Memorial was a deliberate fraud and imposition on the Senate, entirely without evidence to support it, known to be false by the parties who signed it, fabricated for the sole purpose of procuring an investigation that would not otherwise have been ordered. It was a foul and cruel calumny against ten eminent citizens of high character, and the creatures who made it, by the subsequent withdrawal of its statements, stand before the world as self-convicted libelers, slanderers and liars.

During the pendency of these proceedings I have invited the widest and minutest scrutiny. No objections to evidence have been interposed, however frivolous and incompetent and irrelevant it might be. I visited New York and personally importuned the President of the Telegraph Company to produce all messages without hesitation or

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delay. The books and vaults of the banks have been opened for inspection, and private correspondence has been freely disclosed.

Conscious of rectitude, and confiding in the justice of the lofty tribunal before which I was arraigned, I stood silent amid calumnious clamors. Preferring that the decision should not be biased by personal considerations, I made no statement and gave no testimony before the Committee in refutation of the idle inuendoes that were dignified by the name of evidence. I attended strictly to my public duties, asking no quarter, ready to meet every accusation, exhibiting no hesitation, concealing nothing, shielding myself behind no technicalities nor presumptions.

The conduct of the prosecution was inconceivably brutal and cowardly. Not content with the opportunity afforded them to defeat me before the people in the canvass of 1878, before the Legislature that elected me, before the Investigating Committee of the House at Topeka, before the Committee on Privileges and Elections, and before the Senate, they habitually resorted to the industrious circulation of newspaper calumnies, the invention of slanders and lies, to prejudice my character and standing before the Committee and the Senate. One of the counsel for the Memorialists prepared and published a pamphlet, purporting to be a statement of the evidence in the "Ingalls