"Accustomed as I was to converse with Mr. Tilden freely upon all public questions, even when our views were most at variance, having always been in the habit of reading everything which I knew to come from his pen, I feel that I may safely challenge anybody to produce a particle of evidence, either oral or in print, of any sympathy on his part either with secession or with slavery, or any evidence that in the course he felt it his duty to pursue he was not actuated by his best judgment as to what was wise and right for the government and for the welfare of his country. After the breach with the South in 1854, I think I am competent to affirm that he had no partisan relations whatever with slave-holding States. In a letter to the _Evening Post_, written in February, 1863, he speaks of being taunted by Senator Preston King as an object of proscription by the South, and of being asked if he thought his name could pass the Senate of the United States. "'I answered,' said Mr. Tilden, 'that it was a matter of very little consequence to me whether it could or not; but that it was of great consequence to me that I should do what I thought best for the country.' "Every act and every expression of his during the war, so far as it has come under my cognizance, was in full accordance with this position, and, what is more, in entire harmony with the whole tenor of his life. "Better than any person that I knew, he comprehended the irreconcilability of the forces that were arraying themselves against each other in the country. Exaggerating, perhaps, the danger of attempting to rule the country by a sectional party, he deemed it the part of wise statesmanship to postpone as long as possible, in the hope, through the mediatorial offices of time and its inevitable changes, of avoiding a collision. "No one contested the force of his reasoning on this subject; but they derided his apprehensions of a civil war. So preposterous did they appear to the impassioned multitude in the North, that I remember myself to have been asked by one of his personal friends whether he was quite in his right mind on the subject.