ited States.

"My Dear Sir:--Having been elected a Member of the Senate of the
United States, I have the honor to resign the office of Secretary
of the Treasury, to take effect this day. In thus severing our
official relations, I avail myself of the opportunity to express
my grateful appreciation and heartfelt thanks for the support and
assistance you have uniformly given me in the discharge of the
duties of that office. I shall ever cherish with pleasant memories
my friendly association with you as a member of your cabinet, and
shall follow you in your retirement from your great office with my
best wishes and highest regards.

"Very truly your friend,
"John Sherman."

During my service as Secretary of the Treasury I had been arraigned
in every issue of the Sunday "Capital," a newspaper published in
Washington, in the severest terms of denunciation, by Don Piatt,
the owner of the paper. He was a brilliant but erratic writer,
formerly a member of the Ohio legislature and a native of that
state. I believed that his animosity to me grew out of my re-
election to the Senate in 1865, when General Schenck, who was warmly
supported by Piatt, was my competitor. Schenck and I always
maintained friendly relations. He served his district long and
faithfully in the House of Representatives, was a brilliant debater,
had the power of condensing a statement or argument in the fewest
possible words, and uttering them with effective force. Next to
Mr. Corwin, and in some respects superior to him, Schenck was ranked
as the ablest Member of the House of Representatives from Ohio
during his period of active life, from 1840 to his death, at
Washington, D. C., March 23, 1890. Schenck freely forgave me for
his defeat, but Piatt never did.

At the close of my term as secretary, much to my surprise, Piatt
wrote and published in his paper an article, a portion of which I
trust I will be pardoned for inserting here:

"When John Sherman took the treasury, in March, 1877, it was plain
that the _piece de resistance_ of his administration would be the
experiment of the resumption act, which John, as chairman of the
Senate finance committee, had elaborated two years before, and
which was then just coming upon the threshold of practical test.
The question at issue was whether resumption of specie payments,
after eighteen years of suspension, could be accomplished through
the operation of laws of Congress, which, if not absolutely in