"I am inspired with confidence from the information I get from Washington that things, as they appear there, are not _worsening_ for me, and if the business at the delegate meeting is done as it ought to be my prospects will be much improved. "Yours truly, "W. L. MARCY. "_Saml. J. Tilden, Esq._" MARTIN VAN BUREN TO S. J. TILDEN "LINDENWALD, _Sept. 17th, '52_. "MY DEAR SIR,--Accept my thanks for your attention to my stock affair. Please deposit the balance to my credit in Mr. Worth's bank. I regret your inability to visit me, as I long to have an old-fashioned chat with you. "In haste, "Very truly yours, "M. VAN BUREN." TILDEN TO---- SUGGESTION FOR PRESIDENT PIERCE IN THE ORGANIZATION AND CONDUCT OF HIS ADMINISTRATION "NEW YORK, _Jany. 15th, 1853_. "MY DEAR SIR,--I thank you for the copy of Hawthorne's _Memoirs_. It would have reminded me, if I had forgotten, that I promised to write you my views on the subject of our conversation when I last had the pleasure to see you. I should have done so earlier, but engagements, which it is no exaggeration to call incessant, have left me no opportunity. "The preliminary question is, on what general theory is the new administration to be formed? Is the Cabinet to be composed of those who are commonly regarded as Presidential men--who were candidates for the recent nomination--and are surrounded by the affiliations which naturally grow up around those occupying that position? It seems to me that this would be attempting to stand steadily and firmly on a half-dozen different stools. The President might himself look after the success of his administration, while his constitutional helpers were thinking how each measure and each appointment would affect their pretensions to the succession; or he might content himself with the formal honor of presiding over the councils of these heads of factions. But, in my judgment, he ought to be--not what Victoria is in the British government, not a grand Elector, as Sieyès would have made Napoleon, not a mere chooser of the actual rulers--but the real and responsible head of the administration. That he may be such, he should have, as far as practicable, a Cabinet able to perform its duty towards him, faithfully and effectively, and not inviting by the aspirations of its members internal dissension or external hostility. In the last term of an administration, it may be difficult to exclude pretensions to the succession. But why incur the embarrassments which they never fail to generate, during a first term, unless it be certain that it is also the last! And is it to be now assumed that the Democracy will look from the candidate through whom it solved the difficulties of a choice at the last convention, and to candidates through whom it found itself unable to solve those difficulties? It is not clear that the party can, after