"But without speculating upon the causes or motives for such vote and acquiescence the facts are beyond dispute. The House of Representatives did not elect Mr. Tilden in the manner prescribed by the Constitution or in any other. On the other hand, it did concur with the Senate in anticipating and preventing the contingency in which it might have had to act, and in providing beforehand an expedient which incapacitated it for supplying a failure of an election by the colleges. It adopted the electoral law, and went through all the forms of the electoral scheme. True, it afterwards rebuked itself by passing a declaratory resolution condemning the electoral commission, and asserting that Mr. Tilden had been the choice of the people. But the Constitution had not provided that a man should or could take office as President on a declaratory resolution of the House of Representatives. If that resolution could have had full effect to abrogate the electoral law which the House had assisted to enact, it would still have furnished Mr. Tilden with no warrant of authority for taking the oath of office. Had Mr. Tilden been declared President-elect by either of the constitutional methods, no one who knows him can doubt that he would have taken the oath and the office or sealed the people's choice with his blood, as he was in duty bound to do. "I do not weary you with the recapitulation of these facts, because I suppose any of them new to you. On the contrary, they are all now matters of history. It is because they are of public notoriety, and because they point so directly to the one and inevitable conclusion that Mr. Tilden's responsibility in the late canvass terminated at the ballot-box, that I recall them here to justify in your eyes his silence upon the subject referred to in your letter, and his perfect faith in the good sense and justice of his countrymen. "I need hardly say that in what I have here written in explanation of Mr. Tilden's attitude before the country I have written as his friend, not for him. "Very truly yours, "JOHN BIGELOW." TILDEN TO JOHN A. McCLERNAND "_Confidential._ "GRAMERCY PARK, NEW YORK, _March 16, 1880_. "MY DEAR GENERAL,--I thoroughly appreciate the motives which prompted your note of the 27th of January, and it is not from any want of consideration for your suggestions that I have not sooner acknowledged it. I thank you cordially for your friendly counsels. I agree with you entirely as to the danger to the elective system of government liable to result from the subversion of the popular will as manifested in the election of 1876. "I also concur with you in the opinion that the dissension which exerted a temporary power in this State in 1879 cannot be continued or repeated with success in 1880.