Ten years after the present controversy, Judge Holt, feeling acutely this weak point in his vindication, again appeals to Speed, in the most moving tones, to break his unaccountable silence and rescue his friend's gray head from "the atrocious accusation," "known to him to be false in its every intendment," with which that perfidious monster, dead now eight years, and, (as Holt significantly quotes), "gone to his own place," sought "to blacken the reputation of a subordinate officer holding a confidential interview with him." And, strange to say, Speed first neglects even to reply to Holt's repeated communications for six months, and then just opens his lips to whisper, "I cannot say more than I have said." He had offered in private (if we may credit Holt) to write a letter to his aggrieved friend, giving him the desired information, "but not to be used until after Holt's death;" a proposition quite naturally discouraged by Holt, who made this sensible reply: "that a letter thus strangely withheld from the public would not, when it appeared, be credited." But, when repeatedly implored to spread "the desired information" before the public, he again declines to answer. James Speed would not tell the truth, when by telling the truth he might relieve his old friend in "the closing hours of his life" from a most damnable calumny, because, forsooth, "of his sense of propriety." He could not violate the secrecy of a Cabinet meeting, held nearly twenty years before; a secrecy which he had good reason to believe had already been broken, in the professed interest of truth, by three of his own colleagues, and, in the alleged interest of a most foul falsehood, by the President himself. Before the Judge finally gives up his old associate as hopeless, he craftily points out to him a way by which the ex-Cabinet officer may give his testimony without violating the most punctilious sense of propriety, not only, but without departing one iota from the literal truth. Since his first letter, General Holt informs him: "I have learned that although you gained the information while a member of the Cabinet, it was not strictly in your capacity as such, but that at the moment I laid before the President the record of the trial, with the recommendation for clemency on behalf of Mrs. Surratt, you chanced to be so situated as to be assured by the evidence of your own senses that such petition of recommendation was by me presented to the President, and was the subject of conversation between him and myself." Does this mean that Speed was an unseen spectator of the confidential interview, and witnessed the writing of the death-warrant? At all events, for some reason, the ex-Attorney-General was afraid to accept this opportunity to equivocate.