TO SAMUEL BOWLES
Private.
I have received your letter and the newspaper slips
inclosed in it, and I am very grateful to you for the kind
things you say of me. Believe me, I appreciate the
approval and friendship of a man like yourself very
highly and I find great encouragement in it, especially
in my present situation which is surrounded with unusual
perplexities.
I cannot yet think of the results of the Cincinnati Convention without a pang. I have worked for the cause of reform, in the largest sense of the word, in good faith. I was frequently told at Cincinnati that I might exercise a decisive influence upon the selection of the candidates, and probably it was so. I did not do it, because I considered it a vulgar ambition to play the part of a President-maker and because I desired that the nomination should appear as the spontaneous outgrowth of an elevated popular feeling, which would have made it stronger and more valuable. Everything seemed to promise so well. And then to see a movement which had apparently been so successful, beyond all reasonable anticipations, at the decisive moment taken possession of by a combination of politicians striking and executing a bargain in the open light of day—and politicians, too, belonging to just that tribe we thought we were righting against—and the whole movement stripped of its higher moral character and dragged down to the level of an ordinary political operation; this, let me confess it, was a hard blow, and if I appear in the light of a defeated party, I do under such circumstances not object.
Well, we have now to deal with facts. The Cincinnati ticket is evidently gathering strength, but nobody can
