Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/276

242 example. What example was that? When some mysterious circumstance had become known which threw a shadow of suspicion upon his official integrity, what did Hamilton do? Crouch behind the limitations of legal evidence? Protest against exposing his private affairs? Not he. With a courage that must have wrung his own proud heart and pierced with agony that of his wife, he tore the veil from the mystery with his own hand, and, at the expense of confessing himself guilty of a transgression of a widely different and peculiarly “private” kind, he proved the stainlessness of his official character. Rather would he have those of his failings exposed which men are most anxious to conceal, rather the happiness of his home endangered, rather his reputation as a husband and a father questioned than leave the faintest shadow of suspicion upon his official honor. But what find we here? An official honor of a different kind. We find Mr. Blaine protesting again and again: “I do not think that my private business ought to be exposed.” “I do not want all my private matters gone into that way.” What private matters? The pecuniary relations between the Speaker of the House of Representatives and operators in land-grant railroads. Fiercely he struggled to keep the Mulligan letters concealed. On what ground? Because, as he said, they were his “private correspondence,” which, he pretended, nobody had any right to see. And what did we see, when at last that was found out which Mr. Blaine called his “private” correspondence? And what would we see if that were exposed which Mr. Blaine called his “private” business? Again, it is not one of his enemies and detractors that asks this question. It is Mr. Blaine's own language before the investigating committee that forces it upon us.

Analyze this case to classify it. Here we find not a mere solitary slip of the conscience, not a mere occasional