Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/343



This letter told the exact truth and in effect declared to any one, skilled in the language, that I did not intend to be a candidate. It asserted my right to go before the convention and solicit help in any direction and affirmed that I had not so done and did not intend so to do; in other words, that I was not doing the things I would have done had I purposed to be a candidate. If, notwithstanding, the party should nominate me and the people elect me, as the newspaper asserted, then I would return to the bench. It would in that event be a duty. Nothing could have been straighter. It was likewise a defiance and intended to be a defiance. Should I choose to be a candidate, and should I choose to ask Quay to help me, then it asserted I would do it in utter disregard of what might be published in the newspapers. Again did the heathen rage, and again the cartoonists earned their hire. That a man should be so constructed as to act decently in a matter concerning his own interests was not to be conceived, and one who was willing to go to the Supreme Court must necessarily be taking all sorts of underhand measures in order to get there.

Quay thought my letter to be wretched politics, but there were some things more important to me than either office, Rh