had been carefully examined by the Attorney-General and the Secretary of War; and he states that the question was never submitted to the Cabinet for a formal vote. This letter is most significant, both for what it says and for what it refrains from saying. Its positive statement annihilates the story of a "full Cabinet" when "the vote of every member" was adverse, and indeed of any Cabinet meeting whatever, where the paper was present and considered--such a story as Judge Pierrepont first gathered from the "voice" of Holt; and the absence of all affirmation that the writer had either seen or heard of the recommendation, while he expressly states that it was never read in his presence (considering the occasion and object of the letter and the bias of the ex-Senator), warrants the conclusion that such a document was not mentioned at the informal Cabinet consultation he describes. In any view, the letter furnishes no support to Holt's contention. The writer expressly negatives the presence of the record and the paper, and he does not affirm that such a petition was alluded to, in terms, in the discussion in the presence of the President; which he surely would have done, in aid of his sorely tried friend, if such had been the fact. The Judge-Advocate fares even worse at the hands of the Ex-Attorney-General. Here is a man who knew, if any other member of the Cabinet except Stanton knew, whether the paper in question ever came up for discussion before the President in his Cabinet. He goes so far as to say that, after the findings and before the execution, he saw the paper attached to the record "in the President's office;" a statement which reminds us of another of the same elusive and evasive character, (that the paper was "_before the President_"), and, like that, affirms nothing one way or the other as to the consciousness of the President of its presence. And then he proceeds as follows: "I do not feel at liberty to speak of what was said at Cabinet meetings. In this I know I differ from other gentlemen" (presumably an allusion to the Seward and Stanton of Bingham's letter), "but feel constrained to follow my own sense of propriety." His friend's necessity would have been met by something less than a repetition of what was _said_ at Cabinet meetings. He had only to tell whether he saw a certain paper (not in the President's office), but at a meeting of the President and his advisers, or knew of the recognition there of its mere existence;--a revelation which would not have violated the most punctilious sense of official propriety; and he feels constrained to withhold the least ray of light upon so simple a question. The witness "declines to answer."