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124 so doing certainly made my task more difficult. Indeed, it would have been impossible, except for the researches of Professor Pierce Butler, whose excellent biography must form the basis of all future writing about the Jewish lawyer and statesman.

But if Benjamin's view of biography and its materials is characteristic in its secretiveness, it is also characteristic in its limitation and inadequacy. I take him to have been an honest man. Now an honest man has nothing to gain by destroying records. Talleyrand spent hours of his retirement in burning paper after paper. John Quincy Adams spent hours of both active life and retirement in noting every detail of his existence for posterity. Has he not gained by it? Is there a line of his that does not emphasize his honesty, his dignity, his human worth? Do we not love Pepys far better for his minute confessions, even if he loses a little of his bewigged respectability? No, Benjamin's endeavors to conceal himself remind me a good deal of the ostrich which rests satisfied when it has left perfectly obvious the least intelligent part of it.

The truth is, destruction of records hampers only the honest investigator. The partisan and the scandal-monger remain wholly indifferent. Professor Butler's earnest efforts have accomplished everything possible, in the scarcity of materials, to clear the subject of his biography; but Benjamin's popular reputation will probably remain what it was at the end of the war. That is, both North