In overcoming this reluctance I am aided by Senators who are determined to make me speak. The Senator from Wisconsin, [Mr. HOWE,] who appears as prosecuting officer, after alleging these personal relations as the _gravamen_ of accusation against me,--making the issue pointedly on this floor, and actually challenging reply,--not content with the opportunity of this Chamber, hurried to the public press, where he repeated the accusation, and now circulates it, as I am told, under his frank, crediting it in formal terms to the liberal paper in which it appeared, but without allusion to the editorial refutation which accompanied it. On still another occasion, appearing still as prosecuting officer, the same Senator volunteered, out of his own invention, to denounce me as leaving the Republican party,--and this he did, with infinite personality of language and manner, in the very face of my speech to which he was replying, where, in positive words, I declare that I speak “for the sake of the Republican party,” which I hope to save from responsibility for wrongful acts, and then, in other words making the whole assumption of the Senator an impossibility, I announce, that in speaking for the Republican party it is “because from the beginning I have been the faithful servant of that party and aspire to see it strong and triumphant.”[95] In the face of this declared aspiration, in harmony with my whole life, the Senator delivered his attack, and, assuming to be nothing less than Pope, launched against me his bull of excommunication. Then, again playing Pope, he took back his thunder, with the apology that others thought so, and this alleged understanding of others he did not hesitate to set above my positive and contemporaneous language that I aspired to see the Republican party strong and triumphant. Then came the Senator from Ohio, [Mr. SHERMAN,] who, taking up his vacation pen, added to the articles of impeachment by a supplementary allegation, adopted by the Senator under a misapprehension of facts. Here was another challenge. During all this time I have been silent. Senators have spoken, and then rushed into print; but I have said nothing. They have had their own way with regard to me. It is they who leave me no alternative. * * * * *