S. J. TILDEN TO H. A. TILDEN
"N. Y., Nov. 14, 1873.
"Dear Henry,—I have but a moment. I am pressed on every side with urgent demands.
"There will be no use in your asking me for any further aid, unless you can make up your mind to abandon your pride and imperious will, and come to terms which I have so long advised for your own good and which I ought long ago to have enforced for my own peace and safety.
"I scarcely like to repeat my ideas, because I frequently hear, through indirect channels, of your complaint that I go back 18 years, and so you don't wish to talk with me.
"Now, I never have recurred to painful topics merely to wound, but only to try to impress the lessons which you ought to have derived from your own experience, but which you never would admit to me, and which you have never acted on. If it is hopeless to expect that you will correct errors—if you are too proud to admit them—what resource have I but to keep that which is [left] out of your power? What hope is there that anything I can do will be of any permanent use to you or your family? What can I do but turn away my thoughts from a man—this affair, which has cost me more anxiety, trouble, hazard of my own affairs and of health than everybody and everything in life—who grabs anything of mine he can lay his hands on without asking me, never consults me about restoring it, and thinks it right to do just as he pleases about incurring new expenditures and operations in preference to paying his creditors, whom he does not think it necessary to consult, or, indeed, to have any rights but to submit to what he, in his supreme good pleasure, chooses to do.
"In prudence and in morality you have much to do to regain my good opinion. The first thing is to see and admit your errors. The next is to show signs of amending them.
"1. An ordinary creditor would have a right to know, frankly and truly, the situation of a debtor. Still more so would a man who was aiding as a matter of favor—friendship or affection.
"In twenty years I have been able to get nothing from you which was not wrung out, even when I was making new advances at great sacrifices. Then as scanty as possible. I never had any information about your Michigan transactions. I never have been able to get information in season to advise about the shaping of your plans.
"You have seemed to think that everybody ought to accept your own view of your affairs—allow you to embark in new undertakings money justly due to your creditors without their consent or knowledge—and that it was almost a piece of impertinence for them to wish to know anything about their own money."