Never were the possibilities for good of a great office like that of Governor of New York so happily developed and displayed. In the course of an administration of two years, an enormous reduction in taxation was effected; the administrative system in every department was improved; the lobby was almost dispersed; and at the same time the Governor, in his communications with the public through his annual messages, his veto messages, and speeches upon official and other public occasions, was furnishing to the people of the State, and indeed of the whole country, a nearly complete exposition, theoretical and practical, of the whole work of public administration. I have never read a state paper which equals his second annual message in the power and ease with which it treats of the principles upon which government should be conducted, or in the order and perspicuity with which it arranges and sets forth the details of public business. In this paper he considers at much length the then depressed condition of business, its causes, and the proper remedies. It may be thought--was thought at the time by some--that this was going beyond the domain of state affairs in order to make an ambitious display of knowledge upon the larger concerns of the nation; but it would be well if every man possessing such knowledge as is here exhibited, and such a capacity for communicating it, would embrace all opportunities to display it. Governor Tilden, however, had a special motive in placing his views before the country at that time. He saw the false policy of indefinite issues of government legal-tender currency everywhere taking hold of the public mind, and that, unless speedily corrected, it would acquire a force to which the timidity of political leaders would submit. He had already induced a convention of the Democratic party in New York to take ground against it. He wished to draw forth a similar declaration from the Democracy of the nation, at its next convention for the nomination of a President. He succeeded; and to his influence, probably, more than to that of any other man, we owe the downfall of the paper-money delusion.