I can recall now the scenes in the Convention Hall when Carl Schurz nominated Horace Greeley. Outside of some cheering on the part of those who were party to the trickery, the nomination was received with ominous stillness. Suddenly, from out of the gallery, near where I was seated, there came a thin, quavering, piercing voice, like the cry of a seer of the wilderness or a wandering Jeremiah: "Sold, by God, but the goods not delivered!" The words sounded then like a pronouncement of doom; but it proved not to be so. The "deal" was carried out, and the "goods" were delivered. Grant was elected, and Greeley, betrayed, retired, a heart-broken man. Before I close this chapter on the Presidency, I wish to record here one distinct service which I believe I rendered this city and the country during my campaign. It was I, and not the New York newspapers, that first exposed the so-called "Tweed Ring." I began the fight against this ring of corrupt politicians, single-handed, and kept it up for more than a year before any New York paper or any other journal took up the issue. The New York papers, in fact, refused to publish my speech exposing this gang of public plunderers, and it was published in the Lyons, N. Y., Republican on April 22, '71. The speech itself was made long before Tweed had been accused of misuse of public funds. While I was on the platform, a voice asked me "Who is the ring?" I had been attacking the "ring" in every public utterance in New York. I replied: "Hoffman, Tweed, Sweeney, Fisk, and Gould." Later, in the same speech, I said: "Tweed and Sweeney are taxing you from head to foot, while their horses are living in palaces," and then, using, for effect, some of the methods of the French Commune, I cried: "To the lamp-post! All those in favor of hanging Tweed to a lamp-post, say aye!" There was a tremendous outburst of "ayes." In other speeches I went into details and gave the sums of which the people of New York had been plundered, and the amounts that had been paid in bribes to obtain influence in stilling public suspicion, and to buy immunity from exposure and opportunity for further theft. So my campaign for the Presidency was not entirely in vain. It was something that seemed unavoidable, toward which I seemed pressed by circumstance and fate; and I can rest in the consciousness that it accomplished some permanent good. CHAPTER XXVII DECLARED A LUNATIC 1872-1873 I had hardly got out of the Presidential race before I got into jail again. I passed easily from one kind of life to the other. In fact, the last thing I did in connection with my political campaign had been the indirect cause of getting me into the Tombs. The Tombs has the honor of being the fourteenth jail that has given me shelter for purposes of meditation.