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To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:
THE GROSVENOR, Nov. 4, '04.
Oh, dear! get out of that sewer--party politics--dear Joe. At least
with your mouth. We hail only two men who could make speeches for their
parties and preserve their honor and their dignity. One of them is dead.
Possibly there were four. I am sorry for John Hay; sorry and ashamed.
And yet I know he couldn't help it. He wears the collar, and he had to
pay the penalty. Certainly he had no more desire to stand up before
a mob of confiding human incapables and debauch them than you had.
Certainly he took no more real pleasure in distorting history,
concealing facts, propagating immoralities, and appealing to the sordid
side of human nature than did you; but he was his party's property, and
he had to climb away down and do it.
It is interesting, wonderfully interesting--the miracles which
party-politics can do with a man's mental and moral make-up. Look
at McKinley, Roosevelt, and yourself: in private life spotless
in character; honorable, honest, just, humane, generous; scorning
trickeries, treacheries, suppressions of the truth, mistranslations of
the meanings of facts, the filching of credit earned by another, the
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