Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/316

282 baffle it. Feeling himself innocent, he will throw wide open the doors of knowledge, the wider the better. He will not fear the appearance of suspicious circumstances, for he will be ready and eager to explain them. He will not increase and justify suspicion by concealment. Only the guilty will rest under suspicion, because he fears exposure and conviction. The character of the things Mr. Blaine succeeded in covering up we are left to infer from the character of those which came out against his remonstrance. You think George Washington would have raved with anger if his “private correspondence” had been inquired into by a committee of Tories? Neither you nor I know how that would have been. But of one thing I am very sure—in Washington's “private correspondence” nothing would have been found in the remotest degree resembling the Mulligan letters.

6. You say that Mr. Blaine's offenses have not been “condoned,” but that he has been “triumphantly acquitted”; that this has been done by the governor and the legislature of Maine sending him to the Senate, by his appointment to the Cabinet and by his nomination for the Presidency. Let us see. Did these events in the least change the facts in Mr. Blaine's record? Can it be said after these events that Mr. Blaine did not write the Mulligan letters, that he did not make the false statements before the House, that he did not protest and struggle against inquiry into what he called his “private business”? Of course not. Did they change in any sense the character of those facts? Certainly not. What, then, did they effect? They showed only that some people, when they bestowed public honors upon Mr. Blaine, either did not know these facts or chose to overlook them for party reasons, or regarded them as compatible with the standard according to which, in their opinion, public honors should be bestowed. But does this relieve other