Mr. Seward, at the time of the execution of Mrs. Surratt, could have but barely recovered from the broken jaw and broken arm from which he was suffering, when he bore the savage assault of Payne, and from the grievous wounds which that mad ruffian inflicted. One of his sons was still incapacitated because of injuries from the same hand, and his wife died June 21st, 1865. It is not at all probable that, in such dolorous circumstances, he would be required to give close attention to a subject entirely outside of the duties of his department, and in which his personal feelings as a sufferer were so deeply involved. He said himself under oath to a Congressional Committee: "Having been myself a sufferer in that business, the subject would be a delicate one for me to pursue without seeming to be over-zealous or demonstrative." In spite of the eight-years-embalmed testimony of a hundred Binghams, we would not believe that the uncomplaining victim of Payne voted to deny the Petition of Mercy. While no attempt is made to explain the silence of Seward during his lifetime, or the silence of Judge Bingham himself regarding the information he got from Seward, this willing witness does give a most singular and perplexing explanation of his long silence regarding the information he got from Stanton. He says: (in the same letter) "Having ascertained the fact as stated, I then desired to make the same public, and so expressed myself to Mr. Stanton, who advised me not to do so, but to rely upon the final judgment of the people." General Holt, in a subsequent article, states that Stanton "enjoined upon the Judge silence in reference to the communication." We are called upon to believe that the Secretary of War, at the very first interview with Judge Bingham, when, upon the theory of the truth of the information, there could have been no conceivable motive for its concealment, advised his inquiring friend to suppress a fact essential to the refutation of a despicable slander, blotting the fair name of a brother officer. Not only this; but that the Secretary continued the injunction of silence during all the years the terrible charge was being bandied about on the lips of men to the daily torment of the poor man so cruelly assailed. As General Holt says: "It was a deliberate and merciless sacrifice of me, so far as he could accomplish it." And he "enforced" the "silence" up to the day of his death. But we ask what reason had the "Great War Minister" "to perpetrate so pitiless an outrage?" Why, in the days of the trial of John H. Surratt, why, in the days of his stern enmity towards the President, when his removal furnished the main ground of impeachment, did he not once speak out for his slandered servant, or even unlock the sealed lips of the obedient Bingham and suffer him to tell the truth?