⟦Private.⟧

Your note of yesterday is received. Reassure yourself: I have told you, many times, these many years, that I am always ready & glad to help you, in these matters, just as far as I am able. A friendship that can say less, is not a friendship to be valued. I think that your feeling for me has always led you to estimate my opinions, suggestions & advice, quite above their real worth; but no matter: whether the estimate has been born of the heart or of the head, it pleases me, & pleases me more deeply than I can say—let that suffice. And so I repeat once more: Ask my counsel & assistance freely & at all times; & be sure that I shall beⒶemendation swift to respond.

⟦While I think of it, let me caution you anew against allowing my letters to get out of your own hands, even for a moment. Trust them with no one, read them to not even your closest friends; else what happened to the one which I wrote you, years ago, advising you not to apply in French for the Austrian mission, (you not being—as I conceived—strong in that tongue,)—may happen again. The hasty note which I wrote you a short time ago imploring you not to attract attention to your jealousy of Oscar Wilde, wandered into improper hands, & it cost me not merely earnest eloquence but something still more substantial, to keep it out of print.⟧

As to your private secret instructions to President Garfield, lately unearthed, you are applying to me too late. If you had consulted me at the time, much trouble might have been saved; for I could & would have made plain to you the high indelicacy of yourⒶemendation a private citizen’s volunteering to help the President of the United States conduct his government without waiting for an invitation to assist. do so. However, I approve of your assertion that you had been asked—many persons will believe it. It has this weak point—it cannot be proved; but it has also this strong point—it cannot be disproved. I think that w the wording of your instructions to the President was in some respects not fortunate. For instance, this remark was not happily constructed:

“I wish to say to the President, in my judgment this is the turning point of his whole administration—the crisis of his fate.”

This Do not you see how unlucky that way of putting it is? It affords opportunity to unfriendly persons to mock & say, “You wish to say to the President! in-deed, & who are you, pray? & since when is it become admissible that a man who is unknown & has accomplished nothing, may, merely because he is brought into an evanescent conspicuousness by sittingⒶemendation being perched on the high grave of an illustrious predecessor, venture to make himself so free with a President of the United States?”

The clause is not improved when one you add the rest of it & “say to the President”—

“—if he surrenders now, Conkling is p President for the rest of the term, & Garfield becomes a laughing stock.”

This was most unfortunate. These are amazing words. How could you tell a Chief Magistrate of the United States to his face that he—how could you tell him anything so coarse as that to his face? Did you blush? You should have blushed. It is the language of a man as tall as the Tribune tower; it is not proper to a person of lesser altitude.