tatements concerning him that were made by others, but to
an opinion that he was not a person whose candidacy I was willing to
espouse in advance of his nomination. I ought to say that in my
intercourse with Mr. Blaine he was frank and free from dissimulation.

I was on terms of intimacy with Mr. Conkling from the disastrous April,
1866, to the end of his life. Hence it was that I ventured upon an
experiment which a less well-assured friend would have avoided. I
assumed that Mr. Blaine would close the controversy at the first
opportunity. It may be said of Mr. Blaine that, while he had great
facility for getting into difficulties, he had also a strong desire to
get out of difficulties, and great capacity for the accomplishment of
his purposes in that direction.

On a time, and years previous to 1880, I put the matter before Mr.
Conkling, briefly, upon personal grounds, and upon public grounds in
a party sense. He received the suggestion without any manifestation
of feeling, and with great candor he said: "That attack was made
without any provocation by me as against Mr. Blaine, and when I was
suffering more from other causes than I ever suffered at any other time,
and I shall never overlook it."

General Grant's strength was so overmastering in 1868 and 1872 that
the controversy between Blaine and Conkling was of no importance to the
Republican Party. The disappearance of the political influence of
General Grant in 1876 revived the controversy within the Republican
Party, and made the nomination of either Blaine or Conkling an
impossibility. Its evil influence extended to the election, and it put
in jeopardy the success of General Hayes. At the end, Mr. Conkling
did not accept the judgment of the Electoral Commission as a just
judgment, and he declined to vote for its affirmation.

I urged Mr. Conkling to sustain the action of the commission, and upon
the ground that we had taken full responsibility when we agreed to the
reference and that there was then no alternative open to us. I did not
attempt to solve the problem of the election of 1876 either upon ethical
or political grounds. The evidence was more conclusive than
satisfactory that there had been wrong-doing in New York, in Oregon,
in New Orleans, and not unlikely in many other places. As a measure of
peace, when ascertained justice had become an impossibility, I was
ready to accept the report of the commission, whether it gave the
Presidency to G