When I compare their offences, in their nature, temptations, and circumstances, with the crimes of great public delinquents who claim to stand among your best society, and are confessedly prominent among their fellow-citizens--crimes repeated and continued year after year--I am appalled at the inequality of human justice." He made by this series of addresses a profound impression upon the public mind. He was cautious not to be imposed upon by those who wished his official aid or influence, and commonly subjected them to a searching cross-examination, but a case of real distress quickly moved him. I remember an instance which occurred during my sojourn, already mentioned, at the Governor's mansion in Albany. We were at work together rather late one evening, when he was told that a little girl wished to see him. She was wretchedly clad, and seemed to be in great misery. Moments were then quite precious to him, but he dropped everything and spent half an hour with her. When he returned to the library where we were at work he told me her tale. It was that she was the oldest of several children; that her father was a drunkard and cruel to her mother, who also sometimes got intoxicated--though, as the girl said, only when her father abused her--and who had, the day before, although having a nursing infant only a few weeks old, been sent to prison for ten days for drunkenness; that the little girl had been vainly endeavoring to take care of the infant and the rest of the family, but had given up in despair. The Governor seemed a good deal moved at this separation of mother and infant, and spoke with indignation of the manner in which the criminal law was administered in the lower courts by incompetent magistrates. He immediately despatched a secretary to the executive chamber for a sealed pardon in blank, filled it up and signed it, and sent the same secretary with the girl to the prison, with instructions to see that the woman was released and taken to her home that very night. I asked him whether this was not rather hasty and inconsiderate action, adding that possibly the magistrate, if consulted, might give a different statement of the case. He answered: "No, and I wouldn't believe him if he did. Don't I know that the little girl told me the truth?" In assigning to Governor Tilden capacities for public usefulness superior to those of other men of his generation, one qualification should perhaps be made. He could not have led, or rather guided, as Lincoln did, the storm of patriotic passion which the Southern insurrection aroused. There are resistless currents in human affairs which disdain the feeble control of mere reason, and insist upon working their way by force alone. War is a conflict of the passions, and, when it becomes necessary or preferable to peace, those passions should be inflamed rather than checked.