"Now as to the matter of explanation and defense, I have felt in no haste, because I am sensible that I may deserve some castigation for having been too yielding in the first and last of these cases, and I have endeavored to school myself neither to wince, nor to be made sour by fault finding, which I am conscious I deserve, but to try to be improved and made better by it. If I were to make a defence for myself I should make about the substance of these remarks and this Confession a preface to it, and yet it might not be either very graceful, or very wise. "This matter of pardons is the most troublesome to me of anything I yet find connected with my troublesome office. The applications will, I think, average from 3 to 5 per day, from the day I took the oath of office. My predecessor left an enormous legacy of undecided cases, and several with promises of pardons after specific periods, which are occasionally falling in, and this has greatly increased my labor. "I do not intend to exercise this fearful power carelessly, or loosely, and yet I feel daily that I am in danger of doing it. I find that Courts, and Judges, and Jurors, and District Attorneys, sign with some of the facility which attends applications for office, and that the officers of the prison are also sometimes under the influence of the amiable weakness, so that there is no standard by which I can govern my action, and it is probably impossible to avoid occasional impositions. "I thank you most sincerely for your friendly care, manifested by your note, and will now leave these cases with you, and Mr. O'Sullivan, with whom I had a hasty verbal conversation about them yesterday. "Will you do me the favor to read this hasty letter to my friend Judge Vanderpoel, and say to him that I should have written it to him, if I had not preferred to trouble you with it, that I thank him most earnestly for his letter to Mr. Van Buren, and have intended to write him daily, since I saw that letter, but have not been able to find the time; and that, while I will hold this as the necessary answer from me to the part of it touching pardons, I will soon write him a satisfactory reply to the personal portions of it, for which I also thank him, as he is one of the last men I would have intentionally wounded by a careless, and what was intended to be a jocose remark. "I am Very Truly Y'rs, "SILAS WRIGHT." TILDEN TO J. L. O'SULLIVAN "WASHINGTON, _May 31_ (_Sat._), _2:30 P.M., 1845_. "MY DEAR O'S.,--At the levee last evening which I attended for the purpose, I made an appointment with the Pres., and am now waiting in the War for the Cabinet to disperse.