On his return from the West, General Garfield found the Credit Mobilier scandal looming up like a cyclone in the Congressional sky. Living a life of study, research, and thought, of spotless character and the purest intention, he was inexpressibly pained. A private letter of December 31, 1872, to his bosom friend Hinsdale, is indicative of his feelings: “The Credit Mobilier scandal has given me much pain. As I told you last fall, I feared it would turn and that the company itself was a bad thing. So I think it will, and perhaps some members of Congress were conscientiously parties to its plans. It has been a new form of trial for me to see my name flying the rounds of the press in connection with the basest of crimes. It is not enough for one to know that his heart and motives have been pure and true, if he is not sure but that good men here and there, who do not know him, will set him down among the lowest men of doubtful morality. There is nothing in my relation to the case for which the tenderest conscience of the most scrupulous honor can blame me. It is fortunate that I never fully concluded to accept the offer made me; but it grieves me greatly to have been negotiating with a man who had so little sense of truth and honor as to use his proposals for a purpose in a way now apparent to me. I shall go before the committee, and in due time before the House, with a full statement of all that is essential to the case, so far as I am concerned. You and I are now nearly in middle life, and have not yet become soured and shriveled with the wear and tear of life. Let us pray to be delivered from that condition where life and nature have no fresh, sweet sensations for us.” His correspondence at this time with President Hinsdale, in which he uncovers his secret heart, is full of expressions of disgust with politics, “where ten years of honest toil goes for naught in the face of one vote,” as he says. Once he declares: “Were it not for the Credit Mobilier, I believe I would resign.” How plainly his character appears in the following little extract: “You know that I have always said that my whole public life was an experiment to determine whether an intelligent people would sustain a man in acting sensibly on each proposition that arose, and in doing nothing for mere show or for demagogical effect. I do not now remember that I ever cast a vote of that latter sort. Perhaps it is true that the demagogue will succeed when honorable statesmanship will fail. If so, public life is the hollowest of all shams.” In another letter to Colonel Rockwell, he speaks from his heart: “I think of you as away, and in an elysium of quiet and peace, where I should love to be, out of the storm and in the sunshine of love and books. Do not think from the above that I am despondent. There is life and hope and fight in your old friend yet.”