It will hardly be credited that this simple and natural course of business gave the pretext at a later day, and I can scarcely suppress my indignation as I think of it, for that infamous “mare’s nest,” discovered by Covode of Pennsylvania, a member of the House of Representatives, and for the investigation of which he obtained a committee with full powers. The letters of General Patterson and others to which it related, were simply referred to the Secretary of the Navy according to the ordinary and proper routine of business in the Executive Office, as I have above described, and were endorsed exactly as thousands of others had been either by the President or by me, and such endorsement had therefore no signification whatever. It was a cruel and malicious pretence to infer that the Secretary of the Navy would attach any importance whatever to the mere act of reference by the President himself because a multitude of such papers were similarly endorsed either by him or by me every day. There would have been no room to keep such a mass of papers in the White House, and they would have been out of place there, as they related to the business of the several cabinet officers, and yet upon this miserable basis was the “Covode investigation” erected, and the first attempt ever made to soil a spotless public life, extending over more than forty years in every exalted station of our Government, as member of the legislature of Pennsylvania, many years member of the House of Representatives, Senator of the United States, twice diplomatic representative of the nation at the two principal courts of Europe, Secretary of State of the United States, and finally President of the Republic. The meagre partisan fruits of the investigation when made, and the refusal, to its credit be it said, of a bitterly hostile opposition in the House to propose even a censure, clearly showed its baseless character.