y to Hon. James G. Blaine, a member of this House, bearing
date the 27th of April, A. D. 1866, and which was read in this House
the 30th day of April, A. D. 1866, in so far as such statements impute
to the Hon. Roscoe Conkling, a member of this House, any criminal,
illegal, unpatriotic, or otherwise improper conduct, or motives, either
as to the matter of his procuring himself to be employed by the
Government of the United States in the prosecution of military offences
in the State of New York, in the management of such prosecutions, in
taking compensation therefor, or in any other charge, are wholly without
foundation truth, and for their publication there were, in the judgment
of the House, no facts connected with said prosecutions furnishing
either a palliative or an excuse.

The controversy thus opened came to an end only with Mr. Conkling's
death. It is not known to me that Mr. Conkling and Mr. Blaine were
unfriendly previous to the encounter of April, 1866. That they could
have lived on terms of intimacy, or even of ordinary friendship, is not
probable. Yet it may not be easy to assign a reason for such an
estrangement unless it may be found in the word incompatibility. My
relations with Mr. Blaine were friendly, reserved, and as to his
aspirations for the Presidency, it was well understood by him that I
could not be counted among his original supporters.

Only on one occasion was the subject ever mentioned. About two weeks
before the Republican Convention of 1884, I met Mr. Blaine in Lafayette
Square. He beckoned me to a seat on a bench. He opened the
conversation by saying that he was glad to have some votes in the
convention, but that he did not wish for the nomination. He expressed
a wish to defeat the nomination of President Arthur, and he then said
the ticket should be General Sherman and Robert Lincoln. Most
assuredly the nomination of that ticket would have been followed by an
election. To me General Sherman had one answer to the suggestion:
"I am not a statesman; my brother John is. If any Sherman is to be
nominated, he is the man."

I did not then question, nor do I now question, the sincerity of the
statement that Mr. Blaine then made. My acquaintance with Mr. Blaine
began with our election to the Thirty-eighth Congress, and it continued
on terms of reserved friendship to the end of his life. That reserve
was not due to any defect in his character of which I had knowledge,
nor to the s