Although each war has hatched its own brood of scandals and given birth to its own tribe of financial and political vampires to wreck parties and ruin leaders, yet at no period of our national history have there been more gigantic, hydra-headed monsters of graft unloosed upon the head of a nation than the series of financial scandals exposed during the two administrations of Ulysses S. Grant. The fact that all of these had their inception years before and, like a vast canker, had slowly and steadily spread their virus and corruption through a constantly widening area until an eruption was inevitable did not lessen the embarrassment or mitigate the actual suffering they brought to the Executive. His own character and simple plan of life had kept him so far removed from contact with such schemes and their perpetrators as virtually to render him incapable of understanding a stress of conditions and circumstances that could ensnare a private individual, much less a man pledged to the service of his country, in any entanglement for gain, through which his disgrace would inevitably reflect discredit upon his country. But President Grant’s own integrity, which was never besmirched in the slightest degree, despite many efforts to implicate him in one scandal or another, did not spare him the humiliation of seeing his two Vice Presidents and a large group of friends in the Senate and the House entangled in the exposure of the Crédit Mobilier swindle of the government. The gold panic and the Whisky Fraud investigation also brought low the pride of a group high in honour and power. Not only among family connections, but in the Cabinet and even the august precincts of the Supreme Court, the accusing finger of suspicion pointed to the guilty. All writers of the period dwell more or less at length upon the bold schemes of speculators to enrich themselves at the expense of the government. One of the first to come to light, and one of the most daring, was the attempt to corner the gold market in New York in 1869, when the gold dollar was forced to 162 on the Stock Exchange. Ben Perley Poore, noted correspondent of the day, gives the following account of this transaction, which threatened to create a financial eruption that would rock the entire country. In his “Reminiscences,” Mr. Poore says: