As I was serving, in a sense, as Mr.Tilden's personal representative in the Lower House of the Forty-fourth Congress, and as a member of the joint Democratic Advisory or Steering Committee of the two Houses, all that passed came more or less, if not under my supervision, yet to my knowledge; and long ago I resolved that certain matters should remain a sealed book in my memory.
I make no issue of veracity with the living; the dead should be sacred.

The contradictory promptings, not always crooked; the double constructions possible to men's actions; the intermingling of ambition and patriotism beneath the lash of party spirit; often wrong unconscious of itself; sometimes equivocation deceiving itself--in short, the tangled web of good and ill inseparable from great affairs of loss and gain made debatable ground for every step of the Hayes-Tilden proceeding.
I shall bear sure testimony to the integrity of Mr.Tilden.I directly know that the presidency was offered to him for a price, and that he refused it; and I indirectly know and believe that two other offers came to him, which also he declined.

The accusation that he was willing to buy, and through the cipher dispatches and other ways tried to buy, rests upon appearance supporting mistaken surmise.

Mr.Tilden knew nothing of the cipher dispatches until they appeared in the New York _Tribune_.

Neither did Mr.George W.Smith, his private secretary, and later one of the trustees of his will.
It should be sufficient to say that so far as they involved No.