"My dear Sir,—Mr. Tilden requests me to acknowledge the receipt of your two notes, and to say that he gives them the earliest attention in his power.
"It is a settled policy of Mr. Tilden to abstain from all transactions which may impose upon him any future care. What he can afford to do he gives outright. In addition to claims upon him from kinship or other special relations, every day brings to him more applications by letter and by personal appeal than is possible for him to grant.
"Mr. Tilden has every disposition to be kind to you, and, as a token of his good-will, sends his check for two hundred and fifty dollars, which he will not expect you to repay, and which he hopes will be more serviceable to you than the loan suggested.
"Very truly yours,
"G. W. Smith."
FROM THE NEW YORK "HERALD," MARCH 5, 1881
(MR. HAYES GOES OUT)
"A rough Republican wit remarked, the other day, that 'Mr. Hayes came in by a majority of one and goes out by unanimous consent.'
"We are not certain that this is quite accurate. A good many people will remember that Mr. Hayes gave the country peace and rest for four years, and that, while he did not make the unimpeachably 'clean' administration of which some of his favorites boast, and did continually, and as may be justly said, brazenly violate his repeated pledges for civil service reform, he managed to avoid great scandals. Most of his Southern appointments were disgraceful; they were worse even, for they did great harm, and there is no denying the truth of the accusation that he put, or kept, corrupt and base men in office—not a few, but dozens upon dozens—to reward them for political and personal services of a kind which no decent public man would recognize. But he passed two or three years in the White House in constant terror of threatened disclosures which would compel him to leave the Presidency a disgraced man, and he probably regarded the improper appointments he made as necessary in self-defence.
"The very general contempt and dislike of Mr. Hayes, felt and openly expressed by public men of both parties, rests, we believe, on a sound basis. That he took the Presidency, knowing he was not elected to it, forms but the smaller part of the ground for this feeling; for, after all, he took it on the decision of a high court of arbitration which was final. His real offence is that he took office at the hands of his party, having carefully deceived it up to the last moment as to his purposes when he got what they only could give him. That great and, in a free government, criminal act of deceit has rightly called down on him the lasting dislike and contempt of his party's leaders and of honest men in both parties."